Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Endless is not pointless

It's been three months since my last post.

Writing is difficult. It seems both momentously weighty and vastly less important, somehow, since last June. My heart is full, and the field is crowded. Everybody with anything to say, or nothing to say, has a forum in which to say it. Other people write better than I do, and more frequently (or at least as well as and as often), and what is the point of adding my words to the towering stack when there is so much to be done in life and so little time to do it?

That's how I feel about a lot of things, lately. So much to be done...so little time...what's the point in doing them? Which things are important? If I die as suddenly as my father died, or my cousin, or countless others, what will be the things I should have done?

Realistically, I know I can't figure that out. But maybe a desire to do something factors in there, and when I'm not writing something, I don't feel right. No matter if it's been said before, no matter if nobody reads it except for me, I miss it when I'm not writing.

("The writing of many books is endless," the Preacher pointed out in Ecclesiastes 12:12. But he wrote it anyway.)