BLOG

I’m getting into blogging. Now I view almost everything I encounter as a potential blog that can be developed if I choose to do so. It takes an effort to focus on what to say, to play with ideas, to take a side trip in creativity. But if I don’t seize the opportunity, it slips away. An example is my recent blog – Time: Recent and Imagined – on my website. I wondered what hidden messages were in the Sailor Circus that I was attending with my family on vacation in Sarasota. Potential ideas that can be whittled from the raw material lurk in everyday occurrences. We are bombarded by hidden blogs. My next blog on “the empty chair” will give an example.

But for now the concept of hidden blogs merits another word. I recognize that my whole life has been a series of lost blogs – unwritten blogs. At the moment I’m writing personal essays that I intended to stand-alone. I published a few in the Canadian journal, Lived Experience. With each new essay, however, I noticed that together they formed an episodic memoir of my experiences. Then I started wondering why I remembered those experiences and not others, and later came the conundrum of which experiences I wanted to include in my memoir of essays. Which of the experiences would make interesting blogs? I needed to make choices. Writing these essays amounted to identifying experiences – unwritten blogs – that I took in stride at the time without deeper reflection.

I wonder how my life would have evolved if I had searched for hidden messages in each experience, if I had taken the trouble to identify the experiences as containers of ideas and possibilities – of hidden blogs exposing choices. Would have I made the same choices I did in my life? Would have I had the same destiny? It seems that we often follow trails on the basis of what has happened to us – embarked passively – and let the experiences become the choices, rather than milk possible choices from the experiences.