The Rhythm of Years

Three weeks into 2011, with an early spring, there already are a few tender green shoots in my garden. There are also a few slender tendrils upstairs of hope that this year may be one of recovery, gains and new hopes.

Normally, when years turn over, I like to review the past one before moving into the new one. This time around, in the transition from 2010 to 2011, I was simply unable to do so.

First, let's back up. I've seen a lot of years turn over; decades worth now. For most of that time, I kept a private journal. There's a box somewhere filled with that old-fashioned way of my attempts of recording what mattered to me in a year. That box knew no self-censorship.

But, since April 2006, I've transferred my modest attempt to record life as I see it, as I live it, to this blog. In the process, I've had to navigate extremely sensitive and difficult terrain.

How to tell enough of my story while preserving the essential privacy of everyone else involved in my life?

How to tell my story in a way that others, who inevitably will read it, will find something of use here?

How to balance these needs within the larger context that we are all living in real time, i.e., the emergence of what Kevin Kelly calls the "technium," which is rapidly becoming the living equivalent of human intelligence let loose in the universe.

(Apologies to Kevin if I have misrepresented his insights.)

I have not yet resolved how these contradictions conflict with my urge to write with a sense of the emotional truth I have witnessed, participated in, and felt.

***

The best I have to offer about last year is a fragmentary emotional history. Just around the time the person closest to me removed herself from my life, other things and people I care about entered into the newly created void.

As trivial as this may sound to some, one "thing" was the baseball team in my hometown, the San Francisco Giants. This is my adopted team. I grew up in Michigan, and my inherited favorite baseball team is the Detroit Tigers.

But, as it turned out, 2010 was not the Tigers' year; it was the Giants' year. All during the late summer and fall my emotional life partly focused on the unlikely drive by this team, for the first time in 52 years, to the pinnacle --winners of the World Series, champions of all baseball.

So one of the very important ways I survived the loss of my best friend was by consoling myself, day by almost every day, following that team's progress.

Another thing that occupied my emotional space was the unlikely and spectacular trajectory of a certain public high school soccer team here in San Francisco toward the city championships for the first time in three decades.

My son is on that team.

So, as it turns out, I had two very significant ways to avoid confronting reality.

Once these two ways reached their conclusion, I had no further way to avoid it, and that explains my posts over the last two months of last year, little of which exists any longer "in print."

This raises a number of questions -- how is it, exactly, that a man can be distracted by an athletic event from his deeper feelings? I have to suspect this goes back a long, long way in our evolutionary past.

My second distraction is less mysterious -- what parent doesn't relish the chance to see his or her offspring thrive? In this case, my son not only thrived he emerged as a star in only his second year of high school soccer.

But why, even with this, did I maintain emotional silence with myself about who and what also mattered, in a deeply personal way, to my sense of well-being?

Why?

Story-telling may be my professional skill, though it rarely pays well these days. But the story-teller always has an untold story as well. And like all stories, told or untold, it has a beginning, a middle and an end.

As 2010 evaporated, I contemplated this particular story-teller's end on a number of levels. The most relevant here was a decision to close this blog, and retreat to the world of paper journals again.

But somehow I couldn't do that. Maybe, as in many other ways, we are not wired to go backwards in this life; maybe it is non-linear but progressive. What is a blog anyway? Will it last any better over time than paper?

The answer to the last answer, so far, is no. We do not have any technology, currently, to preserve digital content. Just as paper yellows and crumbles, all known storage devices for digital content (discs, etc.) have a very short shelf life.

Which means the only possible significance of what we are doing, you and I, writer and reader, is occurring right here and right now.