Fireflies
A couple people have mentioned to me over the past couple months how time-consuming it must be for me to keep a weblog. I’d like to think that’s because of the impressive content they find here, and depending on their perspectives and reading tastes, maybe that’s it. I don’t know, but one thing I’ve heard in the past from people who suffer what might be referred to as “blog burnout” is how the combined task of finding topics to write about, and then writing about them, takes more time than they can spare. That’s easy to imagine. But it’s not my situation, because while I am a relatively busy person, I don’t have to go that far out of my way to blog.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been teased by the ideas that flutter through my mind. It reminds me a bit of trying to catch fireflies at dusk when I was younger. You see a spark of light, but if you’re not in the right position to snag the insect before the glow fades and the flight pattern’s lost, a firefly can be very difficult to capture. You see it, then you don’t, and before too long, you have no clue where it went. And then it continues with the next flash of the bug’s tail. Like before, if you’re in the wrong place, it eludes you again.
Story of my life. I was only ever good at catching fireflies either when I happened to be standing in just the right location as the light appeared, or when there was such a volume of these beetles that I couldn’t help but snag a few.
Thoughts treat me much the same way. It’s why I started writing over 20 years ago. In my early youth, one of the most frustrating things for me was to have a seemingly brilliant idea flash through my mind and be gone before I could trap it, before I could figure out whether it had substance or not. It was probably somehow related to the symptoms of mild dyslexia I exhibited as a child.
Eventually I got used to sitting quietly, usually with a pen and paper available and I’d just wait for a thought to impress me, or I’d start writing, on the off chance I’d bump into an idea along the way. The result was literally thousands of pages of some of the most uniformly inconsistent writing known to the human race. But every once in a while, I’d be in just the right place to come to a conclusion or shape a thought that would actually improve my understanding in some way.
It was about fifteen years ago that I was camping out on this vast hillside. I was sitting with my notebook, scrawling whatever popped into my conscious; what it was about, I don’t remember, but that was when I spotted this young woman, around the same age as me, doing the same thing in the doorway of her tent across the way.
I immediately started to wonder what she was writing about, if her reasons had anything in common with mine, if she had anything in common with me. I eventually introduced myself and we hit it off instantly. In one of our initial conversations, I told her about my addiction to writing, and I mentioned that we seemed to have that in common.
She corrected me, saying that she was in the habit of writing, but she didn’t think it was for the same reasons that I liked to write. I asked her then why did she write? Her answer: to remember things. And in a way, she was right about the distinction. She was at least a step ahead of where I usually started out, because while she was writing to remember things, I was writing to figure out something to remember.
And that’s how it’s always been for me.
My point? Oh, yeah…
I was talking about how a few people seem to think blogging is a time-consuming for me, when in reality, it’s just another outlet for the practice in which I’ve been engaged for over twenty years. The medium changed, but I’m still doing the same thing—figuring out what’s important to remember (and my drafts folder is eternally full of auditioning ideas). Some of it’s dead on; most of it misses by a mile, but with so many fireflies milling around, there’s got to be a few worth catching.
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