I have been quiet, in part because I’ve not much to say but largely because my laptop up and died last week (which is what happens when red wine is spilled on electronics. Be ye not so stupid).
I read a quote a few weeks ago that resonates with me on a near daily basis, and which I offer up to you here:
Psychotherapy happens in that wilderness between you and me. – Siri Hustvedt
I read it in a book review, which was enough to tell me how much I was going to agree with it. I read it in a book review about books on psychoanalysis, so it would perhaps make even greater an impact on both my agreement and my level of dorkiness.
I read that and wonder what reflection it has on my life. How wild is the wilderness, how much does it hold, where does it start to lead to even ground…even a quote gets introspective.
I am not sure what I’m meant to be doing these days. Apart from the breathing and the twins and the work and the laundry and watching the rain fall and fall and fall, there is a gap between what I am and the memory of what I was. I wake up thinking there’s something I am meant to be doing, and as soon as I get to the last step of the stairs in the morning the thought is dwarved by the rhythms of life. My list of things I have to be doing is getting longer and longer. When I want to sit down and write I am taken with Things I Ought To Be Doing. When I do want to write it’s about the idiosyncracies. It’s about Nora’s tooth. It’s about Nick’s behavior. Things that will serve as a bookmark in time for me, but has little to do in terms of breaching the wilderness, it has little juxtaposition of you to me. They are just two little people in a world full of little people for you, whereas here in my world they are the sound and the fury.
I have wrinkles and I can’t recall how they got there.
Sometimes I look back at older entries (note to self: must unlock past entries. Add to the Things I Ought To Be Doing list) and I feel that what was there, what was written, has shades of beautiful in it.
It’s nice to feel like that.
I reckon we all need to feel like that, sometimes.
I don’t know who you are. You, maybe, know more about me. And maybe in that knowing there isn’t so much wilderness still.
-S
UPDATED – I cannot, will not, become a Grey’s person.
Gracious, Shannon. Sometimes your writing is just so amazingly beautiful I am left speechless. I understand these feelings. It’s why I started running 7 weeks ago. Somehow I’m finding my shades of beautiful (among other things) in that. In the most unlikely of places as far as I’m concerned.
That said, I believe that there are shades of beautiful in those every day idiosyncrasies. Sometimes I think we believe the wilderness between us is bigger and darker than it actually is.
No matter what you write about, keep writing. Even if it feels like the wilderness is too vast and dark, keep writing. I know I’ll always keep reading. <3
Great quote. Super message.
I so often after reading your posts reflect on what I remember from your pervious posts from the early Helen years. How much you have changed and yet remained the same basic person. Meant as a compliment. Shannon was not lost in the wilderness. She has navigated and tamed the wilderness.
I was trying to figure out how to phrase my reaction to this lovely piece, and then saw that Charles said it perfectly!
ps I’m coming over for the Olympics (work), staying in a flat in Clerkenwell/Bloomsbury. Is there anything you want from San Francisco?
I initially read your UPDATE phrase as “I cannot wait to become…”. I then though that odd. I wouldn’t peg you a Grey’s person even a bit. Which serves as proof that I know more of you than you of me. Were I evaluating, I would feel as if I owed it to you to meet you half way through the wilderness between us after years of walking. Your half has been navigated. That’s how much has happened.
I haven’t read Grey’s past snippets, nor plan to, but it feels a tick dumbed down. In a different way than a lower level cable reality program feels dumbed down. However, if 50 Shades was geared towards a male readership, I don’t know that I would feel the same. I’ll have to think over what that means about me.
I know a great deal about you, sadly you never were interested in getting to know me. I think you have probably had a sex life greater than anything in those books which I have read.
You write beautifully. I will miss you terribly when/if you quit blogging in a year. Then whose blog am I supposed to read for good stuff like this?!
Love from Iceland
(and also I refuse to read Fifty Shades Of Gray)
I think the fact that Fifty Shades was originally written as Twilight fanfiction and later altered to not be so copyright infringe-y says as much as I’ll ever need to know about it. I won’t read Grey any more than I’ll watch Grey’s. Brain rot, it is transmitted through these things. So I have moving boxes labeled “books – executive branch” and “journals – foreign policy, APSA.” I am comfortable here in the Land of Dork.
I’m not sure that anybody who says they know where they’re going is telling the truth, and if they are, I think they’re fooling themselves. I have found that I can only tell where I am in retrospect, and I’m trying to cling to the backwards comfort of the “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” fallacy, except that I think as a life philosophy, it’s absolutely true. After it, therefore because of it – or as I think of it, everything I am and will be is because of the minutia of things that have already happened.
Your life may very well have been steered in a particular direction because you spilled wine on your computer. And it may just have taught you that you should get one of those clear keyboard protectors (which I learned after The Great Dish Soap Flood of 2011). Maybe make a note of it and in, say, ten years, you can let us all know (via telepathic blog, I assume – it’s the future) how things panned out.
Things I Ought to be Doing. Oh yes, that one. I always try to counter that with “and what will I regret more?” in terms of actions, and for some reason the family always wins out.
Seven monorail rides at the State Fair in 100ยบ heat for my boy yesterday. Seven. I think that’s what I Ought To Have Done, don’t you?
Could not possibly agree more. What parent among us has not done the same. And loved every moment.
I recently looked back through some of my own posts and found a few shades of beautiful. It is definitely a feeling that was surprising and that ou captured wonderfully here. We all need those moments; moments to look back and see the beauty of who we were and where we have come.