Monday, March 14, 2005
Living Out Loud
My work ID has not turned up, nor has my garage pass. I alternate between illegal street parking and playing it safe in the pay garage. It's weird when you already feel like you aren't yourself at work, and then you keep losing your ID...if it was fiction, you'd say the symbolism was too obvious. We try to be so subtle in our art and sometimes life is just that obvious.
Earlier I read a piece in Salon about a woman with a personal blog, about how she became addicted to it and started revealing more and more - from mundane details like what her children ate for dinner, to a thinly veiled plea for help as she contemplated suicide. She wrote,
Leaving yoga earlier tonight I was struck by how much clearer the world looked, how much fuller it felt, than it had when I'd rushed to the studio an hour earlier. The world gets so thin sometimes. At the beginning of my yoga practice I felt stiff, my thoughts richoceting like lotto balls around the inside of my head. As I breathed my way into pose after pose, some pushing me to the limits of my strength, others stretching me deeply, I began to inhabit my body again, began to inhabit the world.
Which makes me think that maybe sometimes in life, meaning comes from just going through the motions. And so I write this blog. And so I wash the dishes. And so I have faith - when I can muster it - that meaning will seep in between these activities, and one day it will just be obvious.
Earlier I read a piece in Salon about a woman with a personal blog, about how she became addicted to it and started revealing more and more - from mundane details like what her children ate for dinner, to a thinly veiled plea for help as she contemplated suicide. She wrote,
In the introduction to the collection of her New York Times columns, Anna Quindlen wrote about the challenges of "Living Out Loud," writing life as it is happening. If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs.I don't buy that the rate at which you write about yourself implies the intensity with which you live - the intensity with which you think, perhaps, but thinking isn't living. Recently I heard a quote - that while the unexamined life may not be worth living, the unlived life isn't worth examining. If I could only begin to live the way I write, or the way I am in improv - no gap between what's real inside me and what I present. That would be living loud.
Leaving yoga earlier tonight I was struck by how much clearer the world looked, how much fuller it felt, than it had when I'd rushed to the studio an hour earlier. The world gets so thin sometimes. At the beginning of my yoga practice I felt stiff, my thoughts richoceting like lotto balls around the inside of my head. As I breathed my way into pose after pose, some pushing me to the limits of my strength, others stretching me deeply, I began to inhabit my body again, began to inhabit the world.
Which makes me think that maybe sometimes in life, meaning comes from just going through the motions. And so I write this blog. And so I wash the dishes. And so I have faith - when I can muster it - that meaning will seep in between these activities, and one day it will just be obvious.
