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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.
Yeah. I don’t have a perfect beginning. Looking for a perfect beginning has kept me stalled for an extra couple of weeks.
I realized this afternoon while walking the dogs (a common time for epiphanies) that this is not a new problem for me. All through school I used to procrastinate on writing papers, not because I didn’t want to do the work but because I got bogged down in the search for the perfect topic. It isn’t just writing — most nights that I don’t make dinner it isn’t so much the cooking as it is the figuring out what to cook.
Growing up, I was often told “If it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.” And, like most such mottoes, it is in some sense true. But then, when the definition of “doing something well” is “doing something perfectly and better than anybody else,” this is not helpful. It is immobilizing.
And of course, I’ve taken quite a break from blogging, and during that time I’ve thought about a lot of cool things I might do with this space in the future. And that makes it even harder to get started — it seems like there ought to be something really fabulous to show for all these months of not writing.
So, there you have it. A totally imperfect beginning. Which is not fabulous, but is infinitely better than no beginning at all.
