Today

She didn’t always stop to take a look around the world. She guessed few people do. After all, we’re all so busy living our lives, thinking through our next mood, worrying about the immediate physical area around us, it’s amazing we see anything of the outer world.

Sometimes she would look up and realize that what she thought was around her actually looked totally different than the mental image she had assumed. Like the background desktop picture, overly simplified and bland, suddenly became uneven and pixelated and full of specifics, not all of which went together. The necessary blur. If we were to spend the time necessary to really see everything around us, we would sit for hours at the base of a tree, enraptured by its patterns.

But today was different, today she wanted to remember everything, to notice everything, and not let the blurriness take over her vision. Today was the first day of the rest of her life.

It wasn’t a special day really. Not her birthday or the day she fell in love. She didn’t get a promotion or win a prize or pass a test. And it wasn’t the worst of times either. No big personal breakup or national tragedy to live in infamy. She didn’t feel any better or worse than usual. And she wasn’t about to die. Nothing at all that dramatic. It was just a day.

It was the day she decided to make important instead, and thinking makes it so. Right?

Okay. So really it was just like any other day, except the desperation was upon her. It hit at different times, but often with no rhyme or reason. Just every once in a while she’d wake up and start to think a little too deeply about life, the universe and everything. If the normal course of affairs was to charge ahead through the day to get to the part where all the necessary tasks were finished and she could just stop doing things, the necessary balancing was this intermittent need to think too much, to ask herself the same philosophical questions again and see if her answers had changed or evolved.

Sometimes it manifested itself as depression and even despair about the lack of fill-in-the-blank of her life. Sometimes it was not so dark, just a yearning for something she suspected was universal and therefore unexceptional. And then there were times when it was an active force, a flowering of creativity and a small rebirth. Those were the good times.

That’s what she felt now, this desire to foster the creative parts of herself that got so little attention. The actual need to act, to emit, to do something besides just taking things in. The feeling that maybe there was something she could put into the world that would be new, for her at least.

Of course, how does she go from wanting to create something to the idea to look closely at stuff? Isn’t that just more letting things affect her?

Never mind that though. It’s not about getting bogged down in the details. In order to act in the world, she has to be open to the world. That’s what it’s about. Yes, she normally feels a bit like a black hole, sucking in knowledge and images and ideas from the world around, synthesizing them inside her, and then integrating them into herself in a new form. But isn’t the problem that that’s the first few steps of art? It’s not that that process is the problem; it’s that she seldom goes beyond that process, to take what was created inside her and find a way to put it out in the world for others to see. She feels more like a rich person fighting the inheritance tax. She made her riches within the economic system, but doesn’t want to put any of it back into the system to keep it alive.

She wonders if an economic analogy is really the place to go to for this idea of artistic expression and the passing on of knowledge, keeping the intellectual and artistic legacy of culture alive. But it’s a recurring thought process, one of the ones that can turn dark sometimes in her thoughts. It goes along with the idea of what is a responsible citizen and what do we owe the future. That those get tangled into a mess of guilt and disappointment and sense of failure is not what she wants to allude to now. This is a more selfish question right now.

By wanting to look around at the world, be open to the world in a dynamic way, she wants to create a dialog. And of course that’s the problem. Talking is not her strong suit at all. She’s much better at listening than speaking. The ideas she forms in her head when listening to others, when reading, when watching entertainment, when viewing a waterfall, those all stay inside. When she wants to articulate what anything means to her, nothing comprehensible comes out. At best, she can explain how she understands something or recognize how something affects her state of mind or emotion, but meaning is not forthcoming.

It’s not about not being able to communicate. She has a good vocabulary and speaks clearly, using words correctly. The problem is inside. If she doesn’t know what something means to her, she can’t say it. She thinks that a copout and not really true though. For with many things she does know what they mean to her, and in her mind, she will discourse at great length many arguments about why something means this or that or affects her this way. It keeps her awake at night, this obsessive thinking through of what something means or why she feels the way she does about it.

But it’s so unstructured. It’s all over the place, repetitive, arguments incomplete and out of order. So is this seeming inability to put even words out into the world, the tools she’s most familiar and versatile with, simply a lack of discipline? Of not wanting to take the time to write it out, organize it, rewrite it, edit it until a cohesive piece is created that makes sense and is even persuasive or interesting? She doesn’t believe that’s it.

What it is is a deep and unrelenting belief that what she has to say does not matter. That’s really it. It’s not even a self-hate kind of deal, it’s simply a realistic view of her place in the world and its meaninglessness. And she can’t seem to make herself find that liberating or unimportant. It’s just words, words, as Hamlet would say, with that same inflection. There’s so many words out there. Everywhere you look, someone is saying something, writing something; it’s an incredible din of blather. How much of it means anything?

When she was young, the block was a feeling of fakeness. Writing about the world, in fact or fiction, was pretending a knowledge she didn’t have yet. It would come with experience, with living. It felt useless to try to write anything that hadn’t been said before and better, by people who knew so much more than she did.

Now it’s different. She realizes this was a lie she told herself out of cowardice. We all know something; we all live in this world. And it can’t be about becoming Charles Dickens or Virginia Woolf. That’s either a pathetic excuse not to write or it’s some sort of arrogance. Like what she would write has so much importance attached to it, so much weight.

Now nothing has weight. Every day on Twitter, 140 characters are posted how many times a second? There’s how many blog posts online? So many of them saying the same things over and over. And even as we decry the end of publishing as we know it, how many books in whatever form are being put out there? And magazines and zines and songs and poems and essays and articles and advertisements and obituaries and sermons and debates and political speeches and laws and parking tickets and bumper stickers and graffiti, how much of that is produced and replicated every single day? Does she want to add to the din? Is it possible to be heard, should she finally decide she wants someone to listen?

But sometimes she almost gets it, almost understands the place her expression could live in between the ideas of what its weight would be and whether that matters and to whom. She feels like she’s almost beyond the pretension and the hopelessness and the false pretention and hidden hopefulness; maybe that’s just wisdom finally putting in its two cents. But shouldn’t wisdom feel more wise? More sure and strong? Shouldn’t wisdom be able to be put into words?

Most days she’s stuck on Angel’s epiphany, “If nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do.” If nothing we write matters, then all that matters is what we write. She doesn’t know if that makes sense at all. It almost feels right.

Today has moved on an hour now, and she’s not necessarily made it a special day after all. But she opened the file, she put the thoughts in her head on the blank paper facsimile in front of her, and she posted it online, a drop of water in the vast sea of internet babble. And she felt good.