The everyday of writing
I really like writing every day. The blog seems to just come naturally but often I find this thing I touch in my journal. The daily journal is the kickstart of the morning and I tend to write throughout the day. I go back sometimes and read the day’s entry but I hardly ever go to the previous days. I’ve felt I already lived through that. I also think anything thing I found and said there I should look at again in the shining lights of Now. The old diary entries hold no real fascination or interest for me. At one point I deleted years of personal writing because I felt what the things contained were some life I had put down and I would never go back to. Living in a failed marriage or in a job which tested me daily almost in my last months were plenty of daily stressors.
So when the time came and I put down the things, the written words seemed to not have much bearing any longer. I’ve realized now it will be about two weeks to the day and month I left. I still remember riding the BART train across the San Francisco Bay and staying a night in a hotel by SFO. I walked to this bar and had some beer. The next day I was on this flight to Tokyo. I had the backpack and a daypack and that was it. If I had kept written journals I would have destroyed them as well. I really wanted no personal record of the heaven and hell I found on earth my last years.
In 2023, I revisited the choices and found years of writing in plain text files again hidden away in some fold of Google Drive. I also had been writing in Day One for years. I read these things over yet again and thought to myself,
I will never touch those shores again. Those reasons for why and how I did a thing will never come about again.
I pretty much knew I had closed this chapter of my life. The writing seemed a lifeline to it and I knew they had to go. Some of the memories haunted me and I hated that feeling. The doubts of some years. The frustrations and emotional turmoil of a failed relationship that had persisted for over 20 years. Produced two kids. A wife that cheated. A life spent traveling in Asia for work. I had written all that time about my things. Deep and sometimes hateful works. The works of a me shadowed by a past that I wanted to put down. Like the sign said at my friend at work Phil’s desk,
don’t look back we are not going that way.
So then I knew the writing had to change. One change was I had to simply delete that past life. It felt like it had no meaning. No value on the things I would face wherever I ended up. I wanted to find new things to value and to treasure. To let go of and wonder about. I think over the years wandering around Asia and then Mexico and then back to Cambodia again, I found a myriad of things.
lately in the every day of writing
I’ve felt this friction of the words. There are things here which have become bothersome to me. Things which I don’t understand and maybe never will. The chances of me ever understanding life in Cambodia is slim. I still feel removed and separate from much of it. Even with my wife here. The people I tend to keep at arm’s length most times. Friendships become harder to find. The writing everyday just takes all this and sometimes there are aches and pains and tears with it.
So what has had to happen with the writing to bid adieu to the old me things and make way for the now things. Now becomes then in the writing and I cannot find the value in the things I once said.
Writing becomes the everyday of things. The Now of things. How I feel now. Today. Going soon to Battambang. Deleting markdown files from past excursions is not terribly difficult. They just go. I feel like then things make room for new things.
This probably creates a chaos of sorts but life is chaos. Of sorts. From some moment sitting in Hanoi around 2020 and a sunset that simply stunned me to the Khmer empire stretching out so many ways. Everything once then is now again.
Photos do stay with me. I cannot delete them. Not because they are worth a thousand words. But because they are worth more memories and moments. Sunsets and smiling Vietnamese people. A scene one day is replayed when I write a blog post.
None of this probably works for you. People tend to want to hold on to their past writing so they pay to get their Day One journals printed up. I would have no value in holding things I said years ago. I want really to hold the mirror up to things I write now.
Perhaps that is the final everyday of the writing for me. To find my everything in everyday. And also realize I never will.
I guess that makes sense, right? The blog just continues the train of thought day to day. For some reason I do not delete old blog posts but when I change things I often do not include the old posts. I have them and they have me but I often feel like the clean slate and start is a different kind of erasing and filling in.