A few days ago, a reader harangued me for not posting since August. Her comments have merit—you can only read Job’s exquisite rant so many times—but they got me thinking about the whys of not blogging.
There are, in fact, several reasons why I went dark in September. Some of them are the usual suspects: illness, overwork, full weekends, overwork, a focus on my book manuscript, overwork, etc. On another level, however, I just didn’t have anything to say. There were a few ideas floating in my head, but none really blossomed into a full post.
Which leads me to today’s question: What’s wrong with that?
Blog advisers insist on the necessity of posting something every day, or you’ll lose your readers. And maybe that’s true. But it also speaks of a much deeper dynamic at work. The emphasis is on quantity rather than quality, on talking rather than listening. Reflection—letting an idea come to bloom by itself, midwived by time and silence—is grossly undervalued.
This dynamic, of course, isn’t limited to the blogosphere. The business world routinely sacrifices depth of thought in its obsession with speed (the only way to keep up is to skim the surface). As a media-influenced society, we seem to lurch from one all-consuming issue to the next: from moose hunting to lipstick on a pig to God knows what next.
But here’s the problem: by communicating without reflection, by moving at warp speed through ideas and issues, we lose the ability to think through things with any depth. That makes it far more difficult for us to focus on substantive issues and sort them out.
This gets really important in public life, where staggeringly complex issues are too often reduced to sound bites. As a habit of mind and spirit, reflection gives us the space to take a moment, ponder any given “truth claim”—and, as often as not, see through it. Reflection helps us peer into issues, see their complexity for ourselves, and start pulling at the various strands within them to make some coherent sense. From reflection and silence emerge the questions that will probe behind the conventional wisdom to the substantive issues beneath.
Once that starts happening, we might have a shot at addressing the reality of issues. By appreciating their complexity, we’re more inclined to approach them (and the players on various sides) with humility, realizing that no one person can possibly come up with an answer to something so large.
Does all that explain my silence for the past six weeks? Goodness, no; it happened as much by accident as anything else. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Maybe contributing to the silence is as important as contributing to the conversation.
6 comments:
Hear, here! I find this also with the incessant chatter with friends; the best friends are the ones you can be in a comfortable silence with, saying more though your quietness than through words. The incessant chatter of everything else, too, having the tv on all the time, the radio, the iPod, movies, awkward conversations about the traffic and the weather, the sound of the freeway always moving beneath my window; it gets to be too much, filling the brain with buzzing, and it's impossible to really think about the important things, to listen to the crickets, to scratch the cat and hear yourself sigh.
Well and poetically put. I often aim my posts toward a societal level, but most of this stuff makes sense on a personal level as well. It's very hard, say, to respond thoughtfully to the concerns of a friend unless you've taken the time to listen and reflect on those concerns.
I completely agree with you. And it may also have you clarifying the purpose of blogging. If it's parallel to personal journaling (as it is for me), a reflection will materialize in its own timing- and that is sufficient. In fact, it's better than sufficient, because you've acted upon the ruminating thoughts and assembled the words needed to post to your blog.
Reflective blogging and journaling, I dare say, emerge from our own silences.
Speaking for myself, I have been comfortable with posting something about every 10 days, as if my spiritual life operated on a ten-day week.
I'm glad for your blog's existence, as there aren't many good, coherent reflective blogs out there.
Many thanks for the kind words. I like the idea of a 10-day week and the patience to undertake it. Lately I've found that I'm much less patient than I thought I was, so I have a lot of work to do.
John, I've felt the same way. I even tried writing yet another blog to try and make up for the silence on Lie Down and Sleep. I felt I had nothing more to say on the spiritual side of my life. Now the OTHER Lie Down and Sleep is being neglected in favor of this one. How did I get so caught up in blogging?
Yet I feel I needed that break of recording my thoughts and feelings to actually live my life fully. A lot happened over the summer--an new job, a new relationship, another new job, an engagement, and then, yes, ANOTHER new job--and I just felt at loss as how to incorporate everything that was going on in my life, spiritually and all the other bits.
Taking a break from blogging made me realize how much I missed my daily ruminations and time I spend writing. I missed the contact from other writers and the feedback I got from posts. It was time to begin again.
Peace and grace.
It's almost as if things have to sort themselves out in the soul before we can begin to process them. On the other hand, sometimes I find writing is precisely what sparks the sorting-out process. I'm coming to think that each instance is utterly unique, and our internal compass will guide us as to what's best in each situation. Very cool stuff.
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