return to my word - ただいま

Long absences are to be expected of someone like me. It's been nearly one and a half years since I last bothered to write anything here. I attribute the lost effort to two factors. The first is simply a lack of discipline to persevere in the face of competing interests. The second is the awareness that an audience does not exist. I am quick to echo the widespread frustration that there is simply an overload of self-expression or self-report on the Internet, such that it all becomes meaningless. Writing a personal blog, itself already well on its way to becoming an outdated medium, only adds to the heaps of wasted language. I stopped writing partly out of self-reproach for contributing to the unfathomable size of our cyber landfills. And like our physical landfills, our virtual ones seem to grow at faster and faster rates. Just as cars and cameras and computers are not built to last, but to be adored, bought, used, abused, and abandoned, so too does it seem that our ideas and words have come to be treated the same way. No matter the brilliance or poignancy of a thought or statement, its allotted time on the stage of public recognition is fleetingly short. Updated, tweeted, uploaded to YouTube, the words and images could traverse the entire world's people's consciousness faster than any airborne infection could grip their bodies. And yet, with palindromic swiftness it will be forgotten or abandoned in favour of the next update, tweet, or upload. Freddy Mercury was perhaps prophetic in his comparison of his well-loved songs to Bic disposable razors.

So why write a blog now? My new justification is this: it was never for the sake of readership. It was not and will never be a benefit to the reader or the world or anyone, except me. And the benefit to me is not the opportunity to vent or whine or boast. The true benefit is the exercise of writing.

Perhaps I am only catching up with what everyone around me already knows. But I have begun to perceive the slow dulling of my thinking, brought about by the absence of practice. The practice to which I refer is that of articulating what I am thinking, committing myself to words and language. The rules of any given written language could be seen as constraints on our freedom of expression. But the rules are also the basis of structure. And I am increasingly convinced that the continual act of working my thoughts into a deliverable structure can actually refine those thoughts over time. I suspect J. S. Bach would agree with me on this.

Many would agree with me that penmanship is a dying or lost art in our modern society. My grade 7 teacher was the last person I knew who could write cursive on the blackboard or on paper like she meant it. In our current world, we just don't need the skill anymore, you could say. But the act of writing, are we losing that too? I am aware that there are writers among us, people who write everyday. But what about the rest of us?

I will never be able to type as quickly as thoughts flicker through my mind. Even if I could construct comprehensible sentences as quickly as I can type, it would never keep pace with the tumbling mess of ideas inside my head. My childhood predated the widespread diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder amongst children, so I never wore a label. But when challenged to sustain my attention to focus my thinking into organized writing, I have become keenly aware of the struggle to maintain that attention. I am also afraid that, there being little opportunity for such exercise in my regular daily activities, the struggle will rise over time. It is a fast paced world we live in. My expectations for the speed of stimuli and response ratchet higher and higher each passing season. Sometimes I suspect I am cultivating my own attentional deficit.

No matter how fast our world becomes, how rapidly my cellular carrier allows me to load an informative website on my mobile device, or how immediate the delivery of international news or pet videos becomes, writing will always be slow. It will always require my sustained attention. To write to the best of my ability will always be hard work, requiring me to strain to hold an idea in mind long enough to translate it into words. But if I abandon or neglect this work, or if I am content to use language simply for those ideas that already come into my words easily, I fear I am learning to discard the ideas that demand more effort.

Respected scholars I know have advised that an academic needs to write everyday, as a matter of principle. This advice is starting to make sense to me. But I do not think the recommendation needs to be limited to academics. Writing is an act of valuing our own thoughts enough to make the effort, and I somehow think this is important regardless of occupation. I recently visited my grandmother in Japan who turned 88 this year. Age attacks many of our faculties, including memory. But I was happy to see that to this day, she continues to write a diary entry every day. She explains it has been a lifelong habit which she continues, "so I don't go senile," she says with a faint chuckle.