What I didn't know I was missing

How does a self-described contemplative end up becoming a blogger and connecting through Face Book?

Myth busting came to mind as soon as I asked myself that question. I’m doing all kinds of things lately that I never thought I’d do…busting, you might say, my own myths. Somewhere along the line I realized that I can try things and then quit if they’re not working, so that’s part of it. I know I’m not making a life-time commitment. That helps with a lot that falls into the category of trying new things.

But the main reason I find myself here is that it’s a medium of the written word. I’ve always known I wouldn’t be a writer if it was a noisy medium. I get worn out by noise. Back when I was first feeling called to solitude, I remember turning off my printer. It sat right next to my computer and I’d never even realized how much noise it made until I turned it off. As the mood of solitude took me over, I found myself walking quietly, and every time I’d put on “real” shoes that made noise it felt tremendously weird. I quit using the automatic ice machine on the refrigerator, and I’d stop the microwave, when warming my coffee, a few seconds before the dinger went off. All those things, that started then – seven years ago now – are still part of my routine, although I do run a heater. I may have mentioned it once or twice. Besides providing heat, it sometimes is useful as white-noise that silences other noises going on in the house…which can feel, to a lover of quiet, like people hovering just outside your door even when that’s not the case.

The other day my son came by to drop something off and then called me to ask where I was. I said, “I was right here – in my room.”

“Didn’t you hear the dog bark?” he asked.

“The dog,” I said, “barks a lot.”

Writing is a medium that lets you begin to ignore the dog barking.

But this whole subject reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to share. It’s about not knowing what you’re missing.

When my life turned in a spiritual direction, it was because I discovered something I didn’t know I was missing. I didn’t think I had the greatest life in the world or that I was the best person on the planet, but I thought I was doing okay. The urges that I’d feel occasionally toward “something more” generally occurred to me as being about wanting the writing life – partially because I loved writing but also because I didn’t want to have the kind of life I got a little suspicious I was heading toward – the one where you work at the same job until retirement because you’ve built up seniority and you’ve got benefits that it makes no sense to give up.

I think of this when I see Henry get so excited by candy or ice cream that he quivers. It’s reminded me that I once felt the same excitement over candy, the thrill of getting to go in what we then called “the milk store” – any little corner store that had penny candy. There was such a store on the corner where my sister and I waited for the city bus to take us home from school, and one day I kicked her good in the knee for not allowing me to go into it. I presume she could see the bus on it’s way to our corner. Despite this memory I still have a wonder about Henry’s love of candy and ice cream. What accounts for it? When you feed a kid healthy things, you can think you’re instilling a love of strawberries that will surmount all desire for chocolate, but this isn’t the case.

A short time ago Henry didn’t have any idea what candy or ice cream was. He couldn’t miss it, because he didn’t know it existed!

That’s how I feel about my movement to spirituality, and the thing I didn’t know I was missing was inside of me, was a feeling of connection, soulfulness, and ease of a certain sort. It didn’t have to do, for me, with life getting any easier, but it had to do with me getting easier with myself. I hadn’t known how uptight I was, how bottled up. You’d think you’d know, but that’s what I’m saying – until spirituality arrives like a release valve, you don’t know that your cork was ready to blow, that you hadn’t taken a deep breath in 20 years, that you were living, at best, a half a life.

This doesn’t really have much of anything to do with blogging or social networking except that, at least for me, there’s a beauty about being able to sit in my quiet room and communicate, and even communicate a few things that I feel need expression.

I can’t begin to tell you how many e-mails have touched my heart and how many real and true friendships, no matter how pathetic it might sound to an older or more jaded ear, have developed because of them.

Face Book is beginning to connect me to a few people I haven’t even had e-mail contact with, and that feels a little weird. I know it’s what the networking is all about – one friend connects you with another who is interested in your work or your general topics – and there it is: an expanded network, a larger connection. I’m not used to it yet and it feels in some ways as impersonal as e-mailing felt when I first took it up. I remember going through a period, during the on-set of my orientation to solitude, when I just didn’t want to use it anymore. Plain old letter writing would suffice if I needed to communicate. I actually sent and received a few handwritten letters in envelopes and it was very lovely. Just seeing a person’s handwriting felt personal.

And now, on Face Book, it’s the pictures. Some people I’ve written to for a long while, but never seen, suddenly become a little more personal and alive for sharing their faces.

I’m not ruling out that I might, someday, want to turn it all off once again. But as long as I continue to find things I didn’t know I was missing, it works for me.