I’m in the process of giving unobtrusive lucidity a new look and a new home. Hopefully by next week, things will look a lot spiffier around here (I’ve neglected this blog in more ways than this lately, but I’m trying to get things moving again). Because I’m migrating to a new platform and a new host, there’s a decent amount of work involved in cleaning up content after the transfer, handling re-directs, and that sort of thing. During this process, I’ve seen a lot of posts that I haven’t seen in a long…and I mean a very long…time. The thought has actually crossed my mind a few times to just archive the first couple of years, and only keep the posts from the time I altered the focus to “faith, art, and culture” forward. I can’t bring myself to do it, though, because one of the things that I’ve always wanted this space to be was an honest, open record of what I was thinking about. I read my first movie review here, the first of many, last night. I read posts from just before and immediately after Karen and I were married. I was surprised to see that, though I have intentionally avoided writing about anything political here for some time, I actually wrote quite a few political rants back then. I’ve been recording and offering my thoughts for just short of a decade here, and, even though I’m embarrassed a bit by some previous posts as I’ve changed through the years and found my voice, I’m not going to let any of them go.
Something that struck me about many of those old posts was that I was more free then, more impulsive, in a way, in what I wrote. It’s almost as though, when I found my niche and chose to focus the blog on “faith, art, and culture,” I became more formulaic in the style of post that I wrote. More confined.
That’s something that I’m planning to rectify now.
As we’ve been renovating this house in North Carolina and preparing it for sale, we’ve been sorting through old excess and downsizing. We’ve come to appreciate how valuable a spiritual exercise this is, how much freer one can feel without so much stuff. As we now have, for the first time in our marriage, all of the stuff from our childhoods under one roof, there’s been a decent amount of sorting and paring down from both of our pre-high-school days, among other things. It goes further than that, though. Last week, we found an archive of physical media that had been hanging around from grad school and our early married days (back when we actually burned our photos and movies to DVDs…remember that?). I stumbled upon an un-marked copy of our wedding video, discovering what it was only upon clicking “play.” It was so much fun to re-live that day, to watch the events unfold. I remember them so clearly, yet they have paradoxically faded into some level of obscurity as the years have passed. I watched Karen, a glowing bride, and fell for her all over again as the day played out, as we took our vows, as we danced with friends and each other. As we smiled. As we laughed. As we couldn’t get close enough to each other.
I had to buy flowers a few days ago. It was an apology because I had lost my temper and said unkind things.
Even when you enter something with your eyes wide open, with no naiveté about just how hard life can be, life can still be harder than you anticipated. The wonders of two lives becoming one, of having a daughter, of all of our travels and adventures together, can also give way to the suffocating pressures of making it through life. Those pressures, while not making you forget things, can allow things to fade into obscurity periodically, cause one to act on them less.
While I remember those posts in this blog from years ago so clearly, they’ve drifted to the background.
While I remember that day and those feelings from over eight years ago so clearly, they’ve drifted to the background.
All have been drowned out by the noise in the foreground, and the result is that I’ve been less true to those thoughts and ideas, less passionate about those promises.
That’s also something that I’m planning to rectify now.