Silence

When I was younger, I was deathly afraid of silence. Of course, I feel disingenuous saying "When I was younger", because I really mean "only up until recently"; and by "only up until recently", I really mean within the last couple of weeks. I never would have admitted it, of course; who's afraid of silence? Me?

But I would pour out words rather than deal with the silence. I would rather interrupt than risk a pause in the conversation. I would talk about myself rather than wait to listen to friends, just because I knew what was going on in my life, and what if my friends didn't feel comfortable opening up?

It's only in retrospect that I've realized how generally bad at conversation I can be. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I can be very on-point; sometimes, my wits are exactly the right level of sharp, my tone is the right level of wry or sarcastic, my insights are funny or thought-provoking. But this is, quite honestly, the exception rather than the rule. And even when I feel like a conversation has been a resounding success, 90% of the time I feel that way because I actually just missed the point.

It all goes back to the silence. It's easier to talk when there isn't silence, when you aren't willing to wait to hear what the other person has to say; when you're already contemplating what you'll say next, so the conversation won't miss a beat. That silence is wrought with tension, unease at wondering if you've said something you shouldn't, searching what was said, searching what wasn't, searching what shouldn't have been said.

But I'm only now starting to realize that sometimes, the only way to get a deeper connection is through being okay with the silence. And I don't just mean with other people; I mean with myself as well. Allowing the silence, and using it to explore my own thoughts. Thinking about how I feel about things, or mulling over what someone else has said as they search for words of their own.

I have no magical story of how allowing the silence has magically changed my life for the better. I can't even say necessarily that I'm recommending it; it's a very new sensation for me, and I'm still adjusting to it. In handling the silence recently, however, I've been catching myself more when I'm starting to veer too far in any direction; noticing when I've made a flub in far less time than it took before; and getting to understand other peoples' perspectives more thoroughly than before.

So these are just a few thoughts on silence, I guess. And as lackluster as this ending is, I feel like I'm okay with just accepting the words on the page.

Confusion

Laziness is delicious. There have been so many posts that I intended to write, thinking, "This is hilarious!" or "This is profound!". I am happy to report that, whatever it is I had to say, it was most likely neither of these things, since I now have the blankest of memories of what it was I even wanted to write.

But I digress. After all these weeks of laziness, I finally decided to come back to this blog....

And the first thing I see is a page saying that Jesus loves my soul, with a picture of Christmas lights.

What??

I was momentarily dazed, wondering if, perhaps, my blog page could have started using advertisements (which I never approved) and a randomly different layout (which was different than the layout I chose for this latest iteration of my blog). I also wondered why I would ever offer poems of peoples' lives (who writes these things???) and why I would offer tracts (kudos whoever can tell me what tracts are).

Finally, the answered dawned upon me: This was not my page. Perhaps it's a sign of mid-quarter burn-out, but this was actually a momentous realization. I don't know if this means that the URL for this blog has been bought out by some Christian mega-company, or if my blog isn't at the URL that I thought it was, but either way, there's some "mega-site of Bible studies" (their words, not mine) at hyperboleandaquarter.blogspot.com.

I'm always relieved when my moments of bewilderment like this are easily resolved, such as in cases like these. There are some questions that I know I will never have answered: What happened to all of my left socks? Why do things in my apartment suddenly fall when they were perfectly stable before? Why is it that items in my room always creepily shift right after I've turned off my lights, when I'm just beginning to fall asleep? There are no good answers for these questions, and they haunt my soul. This situation, however, has been resolved. It feels to have my questions answered sometimes.

Well, all of my questions except one:

Why would a Bible studies website want to be on a website called "Hyperbole and a Quarter"? I feel like it implies something negative about the faith, but perhaps I'm wrong. Don't misunderstand, I have nothing against Christianity; but am I the only one who feels like calling a Bible study "Hyperbole and a Quarter" implies that the Bible, or this particular study, is wrought with exaggeration?

I guess this is just another question I'll have to add to my bank of "Questions I'll never have the answer to".

A bit of a change of pace: A rambling post

I think I'm prone to falling into one of two mindsets: either diving headfirst into something, and falling prey to ideas so big that I could never execute them or follow through, or having no ideas at all and simply washing my hands of things. This blog is an embarrassingly perfect example of both of these mindsets at work.

When I was in Russia, living and breathing all things Russian, this blog had a life of its own: I was commenting on my experience of daily life as an American, chronicling the people I met, the famous places I saw, the culture, the food. And then, just as quickly, it was all over. I was back home in the United States, back to my comfort zone. The blog had served its purpose, I thought. There's nothing worth chronicling here.

It's funny how a little time and distance can change your perspective. Not only did I find new things about my home country that I had never experienced, but I also realized that I fundamentally missed blogging; I would reference it sometimes, and then quickly stop, knowing that all the experiences chronicled within these pages were long gone, never to return. As anyone who knows me in real life can attest, I'm an extremely talkative person; yet talking aimlessly to the internet, without a guiding reason to blog (Look at Russian things! See Russian pictures!) seemed really frightening to me. I always took a person just writing about their life as someone who was a bit self-obsessed, who thought that the world revolved around them and their experiences, who felt that their opinion was so radically different that the world needed to know their thoughts on everything. But I missed writing this way, and so I desperately searched for a new topic, so that my writing was at least a little bit justified.

For a little while, I toyed with the idea of changing the format of the blog: of turning it into a "travel to California" type blog, where I would take pictures of things and find hidden gems in California. As should be obvious, this idea quickly fell apart. The problem with exploring where you live is just that: you live there. In Russia, I had gone specifically to explore, to see as much as I could see within the time allotted to me. Back home, I can't just take days to wander museums, or walk into churches with the expectation of taking pictures of their architecture. I have a life to live, and things I'm required to do. So, the blog fell to the wayside, and I figured I could be content knowing that my writing had served its purpose.

Life has a funny way of making people change their preconceived notions, though. After going through a whole array of life-changing incidents-- notably, a car accident and the death of all of my remaining grandparents-- I started realizing that, maybe I don't need a point. Maybe writing is enough.

When I was younger, my grandmother had started taking classes on writing memoirs at a local community college. She was very passionate about it, writing story after story about her childhood in the South. My grandparents were the quintessential Southern story: my grandfather was not only the quarterback at his college, but was an all-American athlete, and my grandmother was a Southern belle. While many of my grandmother's stories involved subjects that I personally found tedious-- such as the first time she was allowed to curl her hair using hair curlers-- they inspired her, and resulted in her furiously writing short vignettes from her life. One day, while I was still at school in Oklahoma, we were talking on the phone, and she said, "You should start writing your memoirs now, while you still remember them!" I immediately scoffed. Write memoirs when I was still just getting started on my life? I didn't have anything worth remembering!

I had always been the kind of girl who despised diaries. Most diaries that I attempted to keep were quickly discarded, mostly due to the fact that they were filled with phrases such as:

Dear Diary,

I am writing in you right now because I know that I'm supposed to write in you every day. I don't really have anything to say, but I had to put something down in your pages, so there. 

Truly, my inspiration flowed deep.

But all that changes when people who you thought would be in your life until you were an adult-- long after you were married, and had a family, and had become successful-- are gone before you've even gotten into grad school. As much as I scoffed at my grandmother's assertion that I should write while I still remember, I realize now that it's through my words that I can best help remember her... and maybe help my kids someday remember her better, too. It's the little things in life, the things that are most easily forgotten, that are the most worth remembering.

And so, all of this rambling is to say, that I am happy to announce that I'll be starting this blog again. I don't know who, other than me, will read this; and for the first time ever, I am surprisingly okay with that. I have no idea what direction this blog will take-- I have some vague inclinations about book reviews, website recommendations, and other equally random things-- but I have no hard plans as to what I'm planning on doing, and I think that's fine. In the meantime, I'm planning on remembering as much as I can. And for me, that's a welcome change of pace.