Why I bother to blog, or "We tell ourselves stories in order to live"

OK, so one of my current projects, as some of you know, is to blog about whatever it is I'm reading, both for work and for pleasure. Although, sometimes those two aren't so different. But I realized today that it's more than that. I've always been a compulsive writer. For years I've kept a journal, and there were times in my life that whenever something difficult happened, I felt a compulsion to write about it. And, for me, writing about something is my way of coming to terms with it. Not to write about something important in my life is to ignore it.

And so here I am, blogging away, and it matters not whether anyone ever reads any of this crap. What matters is simply that I write it, that I get it out there, that I hold up words and look at them from different angles, so that maybe there's a chance I'll understand the thing itself better.

In the opening to her collection The White Album, Joan Didion says "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," and by that I think that she means that we create narratives as a way to understand the apparently senseless things that happen in our lives. We try to make sense and menaning of apparently random events. And while I believe that human life is inherently meaningful, is not random or senseless, it does feel as though it were merely random at times. And like Didion, I go through my day constructing narratives as a way to fit the pieces together, to attempt to discern meaning, and to ultimately continue living in a meaningful way. This is why I write. And this is why it matters not who reads this or who cares.

And now I can come back to Carson McCullers. She must have written because she felt she had to. Speaking words is inadequate, but maybe writing them down allows for a greater possibility of meaning.

I suppose that post-modernism really deflects the possibility of meaning. I don't know. I lay no claim to being an expert on post-modernism. I do believe, however, that human life is meaningful, but sometimes it's hard to find the meaning. For me, ultimately, meaning resides in trusting that God is in control, that all is for the best. Maybe I write to remind myself of that.