What am I doing right now?
I am writing about what I am thinking about and wait for the question to form itself into a real question. I am noticing the dynamic between question and answer and the rising new question is relentless like waves which cannot be distinguished from one another, a motion that isn’t about going anywhere but surrendering to pulls and tugs and pushings and swayings. Parenting is different now, it still requires deep attention and significant time but it is not about attending to urgent vital needs: they are fine without me for a day when I am attending to other things, can all feed themselves and (theoretically at least) clean up after themselves: the older two can get about by bicycle and go to stores and pick up groceries I need, and in an earlier century I...
Read MoreWhat do you think?
I described this project to a friend, and was trying to articulate why this was important to me, this whole notion of questions. I’m still thinking hard about what questions are. When I ask a question, it’s often an invitation: come tell me what you think. It’s sometimes a suggestion, consider this idea that I’ve been considering. The man teaching this Suzuki training I’m going to be doing in a month wrote about the question as a teaching tool, that it is much more powerful for a kid to hear the insight about how to play the violin in his own voice than some teacher talking at him. But more than anything else, the reason why the question seems like a form of love to me, is it is a way of saying, hey, what you think is important to me,...
Read MoreSometimes loneliness
a ttaches itself to people like a contagion, it repels, it stands like a lighthouse, dangerous rocks here, stay away, stay away. So why do I find the loneliness of Dr Who so appealing?
Read MoreConfronting Fears
Y ou know when you’re at the aquarium with your kid, admiring the peace underwater scene, and then all of the sudden an eel pops out of a dark crevice? That doesn’t scare me half so much as thinking I’m doing okay with someone I care about and all of the sudden some resentment that had been lurking pops out. And it’s this thing where I have always wanted not to be better, not making the same mistake twice, but tobe perfect, so that no one could resent me ever. Like, not even the kind of perfect that people resent, but lovably perfect. So I get to ask myself today, what if someone resents something I have done, something I continue to do, something I might not know I was doing, something that I might not have control over? What...
Read MoreNot an exclusive dichotomy:
I s real life the everyday, routine stuff, punctuated by Events, or is it the big days on which your memory hangs, in retrospect, while the filler of teethbrushing and bed-making recedes?
Read MoreWhat is the opposite of remembering?
A character in a book I was reading last night “disremembered” something. Which feels distinct from misremembering or forgetting. How much more I like the words olvido, oublie. Obliviate? Too much like bloviate? Anyway: dwelling this morning on memory’s various forms of failure.
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