Starting Where I Left Off

My blog posts ended. They sputtered for awhile, then stopped.

I basically haven’t posted for two years. All the usual excuses come to mind–busyness, big events and long trips, but it really comes down to not knowing what to say.  What could be important enough to say about my ordinary, day-to-day life when it feels like so much is wrong in the world? When each day’s news is full of chaos and uncertainty, cute stories and small dramas seem frivolous. If I’m going to put more words out there, they should be addressing serious, important issues.

But those everyday, ordinary life stories are worth sharing, I tell myself, because the people and connections in my life are like the ones in all of our lives. My life is full of kids moving out and in, graduations, weddings, the hope of new babies, the complexities of parenting adult children, new and old friends, and the realities of aging parents. My place on the timeline of life may be a little to the left or right of yours, but we are all on basically the same course.

When I write about what I see and how I’m navigating my set of circumstances, I hope it resonates with what others are experiencing. That resonance–a calm, steady thrum of our shared humanity–may be able to smooth out some of the chaos around us.

I see life through my geography and my relationships. I live in the diverse Bay Area, in liberal Berkeley, in a neighborhood that I see gentrifying with every home sold, on a street with a mix of long-term residents, new buyers and come-and-go renters. My little lane has a wide variety of beliefs and family types–senior citizens, young families, same-sex couples, empty nesters, people living alone and multi-generational families. My family consists of my husband and children, but also my children’s husbands, my sisters, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, parents and mother-in-law, nieces and nephews. We have a dog, a cat, one grandcat and three granddogs. It’s messy and complicated, just like your life and your perspective.

We can meet in the common ground of our dreams for our children, our joys and struggles in our relationships, our need to make sense of what happens around us, our pain, disappointment and failures, and our hope for the future. We have different details, but common concerns. In our individual stories, we can find points of connection with almost anyone. Though I have often been incredulous, angry and sad about the current political power struggles in the United States, it has opened up a whole new opportunity for stories to come to light.

Sharing, understanding, and connecting feels like a big enough goal in today’s world, and yet it is a small enough project to attempt. Now that October has rolled around again with the Write31Days Challenge, I’m embracing another beginning.