Friends From All Over
One of the unexpected benefits of my intermittent online gaming addiction has been the chance to make friends with people that I would not normally have met. Or that if I did meet them, I would probably not have realized how great they are. Read more
What’s Up
So I’ve been away a little while because of a couple of things. I had been intermittently working on my memoir but I wanted to get morefocused on it so I joined a writing group. This has been great for critique, support, and accountability (it’s embarrassing to show up and have nothing new to share.)
Since I’ve been working on the memoir, I have changed the way it’s posted here at the cabin, also, so if you are interested in reading it, or parts of it, you can find the sections listed on the left under “Pages.”
The other big change is that I’ve finally decided that getting a Master’s degree is important enough to me that I should just dive in and get it done, so I’m now officially, despite my advanced age, a student. I’m studying Organizational Psychology, and I have to admit it’s pretty interesting even though it’s a lot of work. Still, I’m committed to the memoir so I will keep working on it, especially when I have breaks between classes.
About Friends
OK, one thing I’m not going to do anymore is say that I will be posting more often. Obviously I can’t be relied upon to fulfill that type of commitment.
One reason for my recent absence is that I have been working on a couple of other things. One is a new blog relating to supervision and management. I’ve gathered some content already for this, I’ll let you know when it’s available.
The other reason is that I’ve been working on “Friends” which is now appended here as a separate page. This was really a personal project, writing as complete a history as I can of my experiences with a very close friend, Don. Don is quite ill, and I wanted to get a good chunk of this done so he could read it while he is off of work for a little while.
But, I decided to post it here as well, although it probably won’t be of much interest unless you happen to know me or Don outside of the Cabin. If you do happen to know us, or not, and want to add any comments, please feel free to do so.
Driving with Moses
I am always getting lost. It doesn’t really even bother me any more, unless people are waiting for me or something. It is just a fact of my life that I will make at least one wrong turn before I make the right one. One of my friends was riding in my car as I tried to navigate out of a parking structure at the mall. We toured the whole structure two or three times before we figured it out. He said it was like going somewhere with Moses. (Which perhaps makes him Aaron, who apparently didn’t know how to get out of the damn desert either).
I realized a few weeks ago why this is. Sure, I don’t have a good sense of distance or direction. But the real problem is that I’m not paying attention. The world around me just doesn’t hold my attention very well. The world inside my head keeps distracting me. I’ve spent much more time in pretend worlds than in the real one, all through my life. Between books, television, movies, and computer games, I have probably only spent half my waking hours focused on reality, and when I have nothing else to distract me there is usually still plenty going on in my head to keep me occupied.
This isn’t always good of course. Not because I get lost, I’m used to that. But there is a world of sounds and smells and sights and textures all around. Not to mention people, who are often quite interesting to observe and listen to. But there is something to be said for really experiencing the world around you, the moment you are in.
The other day I was reading part of an essay by Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer who the Nobel Prize in literature. (The essay is in one of the months-old editions of the New Yorker that are constantly laying around the house taunting me with all the reading I should be doing.) He says, “A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. … To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy and joy.”
So, maybe there will be a tradeoff eventually for all those hours I’ve spent going blocks out of my way, and looking for places to make a U-turn.
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