A friend of mine recently sent me this awesome article from The New Yorker about the sciences of human nature and how they can help us make sense of life. The essay is witty and entertaining and beautiful and even a little bit profound. (It's also full of some really big words. I was pretty impressed with myself for making it all the way through.) As I read it, I found one particular passage staring me back in the face. I read the passage once, then circled round to read it again. Yes, I thought. Yes. That's it. That's how blogging saved my life.
Okay, it's possible I'm being a tad bit over-dramatic. Blogging didn't literally save my life. There was no CPR, no 911, no actual life-saving maneuvers performed in the life-saving event that was my blog. It's probably even a metaphorical stretch to claim it saved my life. After all, my life was pretty fantastic before I started writing a blog. I already had plenty of things in my life that made me very happy. Family. Friends. God. Each woven into my life to lift me up, every day. I'm not sure that any real saving was required, per se. Blogging did, however, help me peel back the layers of myself to help me see more clearly what was already inside. And while that didn't save my life, it certainly helped to change it.
The passage that caught my attention was this one:
"I believe we (as humans) inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.
And though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river. I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.... it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year" (Brooks, 2011, pg. 5).
Powerful stuff.
To help me explain how this passage relates to my own blogging, indulge me for a moment as I give you some background information about me, myself and I. All of my life, people have told me that I think too much. That I take life too seriously. That I feel too deeply. All justifiable criticisms, for sure. I do spend too much time in my head, sometimes to the detriment of the life that is smack dab in front of me (which, by the way, explains the sheer number of beverage spills that one will observe when hanging out with me; I'm often too busy living in my head to effectively maintain the beverage position that would be required to prevent such spillages). And yet.... that deep-thinking, beverage-spilling, head-living person... it's me. It's how I'm made, and when I fight against it too much, I just end up miserable. And so when people (rightly) make fun of me for those aspects of who I am, I often feel, well,...alone. Unconnected.
Imagine my delight then, when I began blogging and I realized that there were other people out there like me. People who thought about things deeply, felt them profoundly, and analyzed them completely. As I began reading posts over at An Attitude Adjustment, or Rage Against the Minivan, or Reflections of a Grady Doctor, I realized that what I was reading in those blog posts was often my own voice, reflected in someone else's writing. Then, when I began to write my own blog posts, people seemed to connect to what I had to say. They didn't make fun of it (at least not in front of me) and they even seemed to kind of like it. Some of them even encouraged me to think and write more (gasp!). I had finally found a renewable source of connection that revolved around thinking deeply and carefully and emotionally. A connection that tapped into the endless flow of information that runs through this life we all lead every day.
Connecting to others in this way helped me to find, acknowledge, and celebrate the part of me that yearned for complex thinking, the part of me that needed to swim in the river that I'd always felt running through my own blood but couldn't seem to find in my daily life. And then...then...having fulfilled this part of myself, I suddenly found myself much more grounded to the connections that were right in front of me, every minute of every day, with those I loved. There have been many times this past year when I've looked at my life on some mundane day where nothing was really happening, watched my children playing, and thought, I can't stop seeing all the beauty that is here. So much beauty. In such an ordinary life. Ironically, connecting to others in a virtual world has helped me to connect to my life in the real world.
There's more though. Blogging not only connected me, but it helped me to navigate my way through some tricky emotions. Again, a bit of background: I am one of those people who feels the emotions of other people profoundly. I can walk into a room and feel the subtleties of the emotions coursing through that room in a heart beat. Because of this, I spend a lot of my time responding to and managing the emotions of others, at the expense of confronting my own (Anyone else do this? I'm guessing the majority of mothers out there are raising their hands high in the air right now.) I do this so often and so well that I often completely neglect feeling my own emotions. If I am honest, I will admit that a lot of this has to do with needing to be in control. I feel emotions so deeply that sometimes the only way I can maintain control in the context of daily life is to simply ignore my feelings entirely. When I am in an emotionally-charged situation, most of the time I just feel nothing at all.
All that emotion-suppressing, though? It's not a good thing. The price I pay for denying my own emotions is steep. Doing so cuts me off from who I am and prevents me from truly being connected to the people who are right in front of me. The famous poet Rumi speaks to this much more effectively that I ever could:
This
being human is a guest-house.
Every
morning a new arrival.
A
joy, a depression, a meanness,
some
momentary awareness comes
as
an unexpected visitor.
Welcome
and entertain them all!
Even
if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who
violently sweep your house
empty
of its furniture,
still,
treat each guest honorably.
He
may be clearing you out
for
some new delight.
The
dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet
them at the door laughing,
and
invite them in.
Be
grateful for whoever comes,
because
each has been sent
as
a guide from beyond.
What's more, the blogging world not only allowed me to feel those emotions in their entirety, but I got to share them with others. Upon reading my posts, people responded to me-- all kinds of people. People who had been in my shoes. People who had wondered what it was like to walk in those shoes. People who shared my feelings. People who validated them. People made comments, they sent me e-mails, they sent me articles. Connections. Again. And again, and again and again. Ahhhhhhhhh.
Blogging can be seen as a narcissistic hobby, as a "look at me" kind of venture, where the sole purpose is to elevate oneself above others. Even now, as I type this post, I can see people reading it and rolling their eyes in disgust as they react to the overwhelmingly egotistical tone. I can easily see how it would be perceived as self-indulgent, self-important, and even a bit delusional. But you know what? That's the beauty of this whole blogging thing. Don't like my posts? Don't read them.
But if you do read them, and if you like them, and if we connect to each other through them--if you find yourself in my words--then that's not me elevating myself above you. That's us diving into the river of knowledge together, just for a bit, before we grab our towels and head back to the shore of daily life.
And that, my fellow swimmers, is pretty damn cool.
Brooks, David. Annals of Psychology, “Social Animal,” The New Yorker, January 17, 2011, p. 26. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks#ixzz1DV0tzytG
