I used to think, because this is how I was trained—in high school, in college, in grad school, in life—that I had to have a Theme. If I wanted to host a blog/website/discussion/writing space, it had to had to have a Focus, a Purpose. I had to stick to a topic so readers or potential writers would know what the space was all about, what I was up to, and how they fit in. I wasted a lot of years thinking this way.
Someone asked me recently as a part of an exercise: you are told you have 24 hours to live, what do you wish you had done in your life? (This isn’t about regrets, I was assured, although it clearly was.) At the time I was all evolved: I wouldn’t spend my last day with that kind of thinking, I would write letters for my grandchildren to read when they hit some kind of milestone.
The next day, though, the thought came to me: I wish I had just thrown caution to the winds and used this space, the space you are in right now, to write about whatever the hell I wanted to write about, any idea that caught my attention, made me think of something else, or was just intriguing. Nothing had to fit a theme, except that whatever it was caught my eye.
And I would make that space something that other people could use as well. Other people could jump off one of my ideas with one (or more) of their own. The place could become a little chaotic, a little hard to navigate, because that is the way it is in life. No one would have a clear idea of how it worked, but no one would care because the chaos is a kind of party. Which ideas are, really.
That picture, for instance. My ideas live and also come from all those spaces. I even got a laugh out of the MailChimp logo (what’s THAT doing there?) because it is so random and because in the story of that image I only had that cup because I wanted an espresso.
I might even bring back Coyote.
One Response
That flows. Like water, tumbling down-stream against and around rocks, then upstream in back eddies, perhaps into a quiet pool or two, and randomly into your cupped hands reaching for a quenching drink. Special.