Hiatus in Many Ways

It's been a while. I've been away, not only from this puerile, neglected blog, but also from personal writing in general. My adult life is now busy and full - full of people and problems, tasks and chores, goals and fears, all issues concrete, real, and demanding my immediate attention. Only now and then, on a weekend afternoon when inclement weather reduces my speed, or late at night when my mind finally relaxes and releases the day's events, do I occasionally sense a fleeting whiff of the slow, thoughtful beauty that writing so aptly enables. That moment happened to me yesterday, and its impact was great since I had not been expecting it, and had not, in fact, even recognized its absence.

When I was young, I cherished the opportunity to write. It was through writing - infantile, unaware, unceasing writing - that I reflected on the world around me. In copious letters to bosom friends and fledgling love interests and in diary entries that stretched over the years, I struggled to make sense of the joys and sorrows, wonders and perplexities, of my small town New England adolescent life. A 15 minute walk from my parents' small house along a steep hill (which Paul Revere once traversed, spreading the news of the British), past 18th century sunken tombstones in the town cemetery, to the little country store where one could buy both bread and the newspaper, along with ice cream, dog food, rented videos and lottery tickets (only in small town stores do such quaint panoplies exist), would elicit pages and pages of meditation on such platitudes as the changing leaves and the color of the sky. I am sure the writing was terrible and the themes hackneyed, but it mattered very little then. I saw reflected in my simple life the books I so loved to read, and I acted out their emotional adult dramas, of which I knew so little, in my mind. Writing was my way of making sense of all of that.

Why does the urge to write cease for those who are not writers and as time passes and our youth begins to fade? Some days I feel my brain hardening, the well-worn circuitry that reminds me to pick up the dry cleaning after work, or to buy plane tickets or balance the checkbook, edging out those others that are atrophied and neglected. And yet they are the lifelines I need to preserve. I live a happy life, full of love and friends and adventure. Yet I am becoming desensitized to the subtle moments which germinate in a writer and break forth as art. Are the two mutually exclusive?