It would be easier on me if you don't read this. And if you do read it, don't tell anybody, ok? You see, just as a speaker can burden many listeners, a writer can write once and be read by many people. Each of them can feel that they did the writer a favor by spending a little of their life time decoding and digesting his assembly of marks and that therefore he owes them a return favor. One of these days, all the readers are going to write, too, and I will have a mountain of reading I am obliged to consume. I am getting older and I may not have the time or energy to read through all those posts and emails and letters and web pages and texts.
It gets even worse with modern equipment. These days, any iPad can very quickly create a video that takes more time to watch than a few pages take to be read. So if people create sound files or video files, it may take more of my days to listen or watch them all.
If you are a sensitive person, you may run into the Emily Dickinson problem. She created sensitive, insightful poems in a new form that influences poetry to this day but between shyness, modesty and lack of publishing success, she decided that the creation of purpose and the structure of a poem and the selection of the exact words she would use was helpful and satisfying enough that she didn't want the bother of publishing or reactions and criticism of others. So, she created poem after poem to be put in a drawer, where her sister and later scholars found them.
I take this blog first and foremost to be a place where I explain what has been happening in my mind and my life. In that sense, the writing is for me. Doing it enriches my life and decorates what happens. Writing more or less rather changes a 2 dimensional picture into a 3 dimensional one, giving experiences in and out of me some depth, some perspective, some appreciation. I thought at first I might like to take the Emily Dickinson approach but my ego wanted to show off a bit, my social self thought I would like comments once in a while and I really did want to spread the news that daily meditation is cheap, fast and very helpful. Google Drive and Google Blogger are good places to store my writing and give me a chance to look at what I wrote a month or a year ago.
We all have thousands of choices each minute as to what to think about, what to look at and listen to. So, despite the title of this post, it is fine with me if you read down to here but I am confident that you will enjoy it if you write your own posts.
