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Waking up was a lousy event this morning. I hurt all over and was in a bad mood too. It took a while, but I got over it. What got me over it was a weeping spell I got into from watching this woman play the fiddle on TEDtalks.
http://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_macmaster_fiddles_in_reel_time.html
This woman is a total musician. She sings. She plays the fiddle and dances a jig simultaneously. She plays the piano to accompany her fiddle-playing husband, and she's interesting to look at while she's doing it.
I was so pleased by her accomplishments I began weeping, and that emotional release turned the way I was feeling when I woke up into a mo' bettah attitude. Then, when I was watching another TEDtalk video, the speaker whipped out an Einstein quote that really hit the spot with me:
http://www.ted.com/talks/chip_conley_measuring_what_makes_life_worthwhile.html
The quote from Einstein is:
"Not everything that can be counted counts; not everything that counts can be counted."
I decided to enter that into Google and see what other people had to say about Einstein's quote. There were lots of hits. Some people wrote their entire blog entry on this one Einstein quote. I think they all meant well, but some people just can't write down what they think in a coherent manner even though it's obvious they're fairly intelligent, and I got the sense that they really understood what Einstein intended.
I compare writing to what Rembrant wrote about drawing. He said something equivalent to, " The only real way to learn to draw is to pick up a pencil and push it around on a piece of paper every time you get the chance. That's the approach I take toward writing, except that now I go clickety-clack on my computer keyboard.
One of the unknowingly smart things I did in high school was to defy my father and insist on taking a class in typing. I only took one year of typing. It was very embarrassing in a way because I never got very fast. I think about the fastest I was able to get in that class was 55 words per minute. I made a lot of mistakes or I'd have done better.
I never owned a typewriter until I was in my forties. In fact, until I built this house I live in. I didn't have anywhere to keep a machine, and I sure as hell didn't have room for it while I was moving around so much. I did use a typewriter when I had that job with RCA, but I didn't have to compose too many letters with it. I typed mostly business reports which were about numbers, and the hunt and peck method worked okay for that.
Getting online with the internet and participating in e-mail discussion lists was the activity that forced me to get better at typing. I didn't start writing blogs for nearly ten years after that. Since what I wrote on the e-mail discussion groups was mostly my opinions about the topics and subjects the members of these groups confronted, that made a natural transition toward writing prose.
Before that I kept daily journals or diaries in spiral-bound notebooks, and burned them every ten years or so. I didn't get all that pleased with the way I wrote out things cursively, so most of the serious (to me) stuff I tried to express was done in the poetic form, and that was basically to keep what I wrote about a secret.
I kept things secret because what I considered for contemplation was a bunch of stuff many people thought was just nuts, and they still do. Too bad, but the people who usually think that way don't write anything more than letters to their kinfolk or love letters to their amours, and nothing at all about their opinions or what they think about life.
To me, that's a big mistake. It means they don't even try to be honest with themselves about how they think and feel. That leaves them to quote other people's ideas and thoughts instead of their own. They don't contemplate their own lives, but those of other people.
The thing about that is that they don't generally realize that they don't even write about what they contemplate about other people's lives, but rather the projections they have about who they would be if they were not who they are. To me that's rather sad, but none of my business.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
