bottledworder

So much has changed since I was seriously blogging, almost a decade ago, that I feel like a different person now. I have changed and the site has changed and so has my eyesight.

Can I do this again? Anymore?

Writing is expression but writing is also connection. You have to connect with your audience. Do I understand my audience anymore?

Expressing is not just about using the two tools we have been used to for a long time. Pen and paper. Expressing now involves knowing the capabilities of tools that may take a long time to learn and use. Sometimes it’s like a new language. You cannot be as easy with it when you are older.

Just the physicality of the process of writing makes itself known now to the body. Sitting for a long time, posture, aches and pains and circulation. You have to think about those too.

The world since Covid has been changing so rapidly. Modes of expression, not just communication but forms and degrees and intensities of certain genres have had to change very fast. Nuance and subtlety doesn’t work as much any more in the in-your-face ugliness and pain and death that is the world right now. Length and time of engagement by readers and viewers are on a path towards becoming shorter and shorter too.

Being out of pace isn’t about learning one or other of these things one by one. It is about thinking with a language that you didn’t grow up with. Can I make this new world and its new language my own?

I am too old to be young anymore but I am too young to be old.

Can I inhabit this new world? Can I talk about it in ways that will connect with the denizens of this new space?

I am rusty with this language although I think I can learn to use it. But what can I bring that is different from those who were born into it and use it like their native tongue?

Experience? Wisdom? Tranquility? Or perhaps jadedness?

That’s yet to be seen. Not everyone who grows old gets wise.

Yet, as those who speak multiple languages know, one language you speak or have spoken in the past informs another in creative ways. Perhaps I shall be able to find unusual living spaces to grow differently from younger folks using these new tools with the muscle memory of older hands. Maybe that will bring something fresh to the table for all readers including younger ones.

So onward I go. Back to blogging.