Fear of Blogosphere

People ask me why I blog. Actually, nobody's asked me that, but I could see them thinking it. Or at least I thought they could be thinking it. Or maybe they're thinking about going to the Bahamas and I'm just misreading them. In any event, in writer's parlance, I blog because it's painful not to. But then if it becomes painful to blog, that could be interesting. So I'm going to experiment with a tug-of-war and see what happens. I'm going to see whether it's more painful to blog or not to blog. It's something Shakespeare would have asked if he'd had an internet connection. He knew a few things about vernacular.

Our four-year-old was explaining to the two-year-old about dragons. He said, "Dragons are not on the earth." I chimed in, "Dragons are only pretend." To which the four-year-old concurred, by echoing the sentiment to his brother, "Yeah, dragons are only on Ben 10." Well, close enough. I'm just hoping that all involved are able to make the distinction between reality and a cartoon program, and we'll be doing peachy. This same child was in church a while back, and I was trying to teach him about reverence. I told him, "When you talk, you have to whisper." He seemed to get the message fine, and I was happy I'd communicated an important lesson to him. So a few minutes later, his younger brother was being noisy, and the older one said to him, "Hey, when you talk, you have to whistle." If the two-year-old wasn't confused, I'm sure he will be at some point.

What this means is that I'll be taking a hiatus. You missed the connection because I didn't make it obvious. Use your gift for metaphor and figure out an application to the concept. I'm setting you free so you can think on your own whilst I'm not blogging. Which reminds me of another anecdote...

I was driving along one day in town, and a car came from out of nowhere right into my lane and almost stopped. So just to play along, I almost stopped too. I figured why the heck not, you know. Plus, I wasn’t too keen on us sharing paint. After applying the brake, my next impulse was to engage the bullhorn, but I decided to let it pass. I allowed the other car be free and move on to greener pastures, and it fluttered away like a dove of the morning. I figured the best thing I could do would be to just separate myself from the situation and put that driver out of my mind. Which I did, and it turned out to be very liberating. C.S. Lewis said that people who resist temptation are more familiar with its inner workings than those who don’t. So I was happy to be moving on. I was at peace with the road again, and I had a new set of roadmates all around me who were happy to accommodate me. I waved at them to acknowledge their politeness and ability to stay in their own lane.

And then just a mile later, like in a bad Twilight Zone episode, from out of nowhere it happened again. A car darted in front of me in moving traffic, and practically stopped right in the middle of the lane — and it was the same car as before! I couldn’t believe it. When something like that happens, you know other forces are at work. As serendipity strikes, all you can do is marvel at it and not complain, because you’re being played like a banjo. At this point, the utter irony of life became funny to me that I had to break out in laughter. And yes, I did pay closer attention to which direction that car was headed, and I went the opposite way. Even if it meant a 2-mile detour to get home.

What this means is that things happen, but unlike on the road, we often have control over them. You can't not drive on the road, but in real life you can take other paths. In our road test, that wouldn't be a solution to avoiding stray cars, because it would create more profound problems. People with yards would be very averse to someone using their lawns for navigational purposes. So we'd say the streets cannot be ignored. Although in real life they can.

You need to be confused yet. Life isn't analogies. Metaphors can be whatever you want them to be, even a reverse metaphor, where you paint a scenario, and then proceed to indicate that that's not how it is in real life. So I'm not sure what utility these things called metaphors and analogies have, other than just to make a yet unfounded concept more understandable.

So the moral of the story is that people who live in glass houses can't hang things on the wall. That sums up what I've learned so far. I'll let you know as soon as I learn more.