American Broadside

First Day of the Rest of My Life

The rain drips from the roof and makes soft plopping sounds as it hits the overhang outside my window. The light is a defuse grey. There is a big evergreen tree that blocks most of my 2nd floor view and provides a busy roost for a variety of birds. It's almost like being in the woods.

Becky is downstairs making breakfast: the sounds of dishes clinking and the smell of garlic wrap me in a warm blanket of familiarity. It blends seamlessly with the low contrast day outside.

Today is not an important day for me, no birthdays or anniversaries to remember. I finished my summer class at Metro State on Monday, so perhaps the big event is that this is the first Sunday in months when I don't have a class assignment to work on. I can take the time to reflect on my, where I'm going and why.

Moments like this are when I can say, "This is the first day of the rest of my life." and take the long view. Which leads to this blog.

I've been messing around with the idea of creating a blog of my own for some time. I've played with a couple of Open Source applications and been slowly getting it together. But then I saw the blog by Chris Dykestra, a fellow DFL volunteer. It's well designed and thoughtful. I decided that I could go on forever researching and learning the intricacies of the blog, PHP, and PERL technologies or I could just go ahead and do it.

So, since this is the first day of the rest of my life, I put aside all that meticulous burrowing I can do instantly and dive in using eBlog a canned application. After all I can always keep looking into the technical side of things in the background while I get on with the important stuff, which is reflecting and writing.

About 8 months ago, I decided to change directions in my life. Working as a technical writer has been good to me in some ways. When there is work the pay okay, not great but okay. It is easy to get involved in writing about technical matters because I enjoy discovering how things work. More importantly, writing is a key aspect of my personality. I have to write, even if it is sporadically. To paraphrase, "I think, therefore I write." Often the reverse is also true; writing forces me to think.

About 40 years ago when I was a freshman at Ohio State University, one of many schools I've attended over the years, I took one of those frosh introductory courses that stuffed 800 students into a decaying auditorium and pretended to educate. I don't remember the name of the class or the guest speaker, but it had to do with writing as a profession. The speaker was about 30 and had published something. I didn't know him from Adam but some of the students around me seemed impressed.

He started his presentation with the following, "So you want to be writers? What the hell are you doing in here then? This is a waste of time, go write something!" I learned three important lessons from the lecture.

First, this guy was an idiot. Why insult so many people who had come to listen and learn? True, it is important to experience the world and write about your experiences, which was a later part of his lecture, but it is also important to be able to visualize what being a writer is. One of the processes that keeps people or all races and ethnic groups from advancing is the lack of role models and what a role model provides is an example to help visualize the unknown. I was 18 years old and fairly new to the world. I needed help to visualize what being a writer was and what writing required. This guy started off at the end of his lecture rather than at the beginning and pissed me off.

Second, while he was an idiot, he eventually made his key argument. Writers write.

Third, he reinforced a bit of Buddhist wisdom that I had recently read: judge not the teachings by the teacher. Even a doorknob like the speaker could impart a bit of knowledge, albeit accidentally, if you just listened with an open mind to the message, not the messenger.

As for his premise that being in school was a waste of time and that simply going forth and writing was what was necessary never made sense to me. At an other lecture, I had heard a speaker talking about painting, again faceless after all these years, that had stuck a dart of wisdom in my young head. "Before you can break the rules, you need to know what the rules are. Breaking the rules through ignorance is that, ignorance and means nothing. A lucky stroke at its best. Successfully breaking a rule intentionally is genius at its best."

All of which leads back to here and now on the first day of the rest of my life.

This blog is what I must do, write: probably sporadically.

Ignorance or genius? You be the judge.

Les Phillips / 06.27.2004

"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing.
Once they've exhausted all other alternatives."
Winston Churchill

posted by Les @ 9:18 AM