Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
An anniversary of sorts
Here it is, past mid-January of 2023 already. Life has resumed its post-holiday routine. Our condo looks like a brand new place, and Jan is doing a yeoman’s job of going through “stuff” and sending some to the dumpster. Our closets look like they belong to someone else, someone who is neat and tidy and doesn’t have random shoes tossed around on the closet floor. Mollie Dog survived the flooring chaos by being boarded at her favorite place – the vet’s office and kennel – while the floors were replaced.
For me, January 2023 marks just about one year since I started writing blogs. After I wrote a few entries to the blogosphere it is surprising to me that just about every other day since, I sit at the computer and an idea floats up and forms itself on a page. I hardly ever know in advance what the topic will be, unless something unusual has happened and caught my attention.
My friend, Peggy, once told me her theory about two different kinds of minds and ways of thinking. One person may have a “file folder mind”, where everything is neatly arranged and accessible. I know some people like that and I admire them greatly. However, I have the other type of brain and it makes life pretty funny sometimes. Mine works like a “lava lamp mind” where random thought bloop their way up into consciousness.
So sometimes a blog comes from an early morning bloop. I think it’s because my brain has been cleansed overnight. I read that in a scientific journal once, I think. It seems that toxins build up in our brains during the day, (watch enough news and you’ll be convinced of this.) Researchers at Johns Hopkins “…also believe that sleep may promote the removal of waste products from brain cells – something that seems to occur less efficiently when the brain is awake.”
I can attest to my brain producing waste products that cloud my thinking and almost always result in something undone. Yesterday I was at work when an uneasy thought began to take shape. It wasn’t clear to me at first, until it dawned on me that I had forgotten to send in a crucial immigration form with one of my cases. I cleared the brain fog and checked my copy of the file. Yup. I left out a financial form that will result in the file being returned so I can fix the error. As it happens, yesterday my client got her letter from immigration saying that the case is on hold until “your legal representative” sends the required information. Damn it!
Back to blogging. I simply never thought I would have enough to say to fill a long paragraph, let alone a page. I live a pretty ordinary life that is routine-oriented. Sometimes the routine will make way for something untoward, or something funny, or something serious that needs attention. That is all the stuff that blogs are made of. The word itself is a shortened version of “weblog”, a term that was coined in 1997. Blogging apparently started as a way for people to write entries on the World Wide Web that might appear in a diary, for example. Now businesses have adopted blogs as a way of showcasing their products or their philosophy or their expertise.
I ask myself why I do this kind of writing. Sometimes it is a meditation that takes form as I type. Sometimes it’s a platform for my views and beliefs. Sometimes I write about the people that I love and depend on. But I hardly ever know what the topic will be ahead of time.
I once studied a book called, “The Artist’s Way”, by Julia Cameron. The premise of the book is that we are all creative people and that sometimes our creativity is stifled by critics, both inside ourselves and outside of ourselves. I did spend a fair amount of time listening to my Inner Critic ask me who I thought I was and how I would be capable of writing down hundreds of words with any regularity? But now I’m in my 70’s with very little left to prove to anyone, so why not give creative writing a try? So far it’s working for me so 2024, here we come!