Not My Last Blog
My friend Sonora, in addition to the recently acquired title of novelist, is also the dean of her university’s journalism department. The last time I saw her, she talked about preparing for her “last lecture” lecture, the idea behind which being: If you had only one more lecture to give, what would it be? Which got me wondering. If I had only one more blog to write, what would it be? I though it might go something like this: The only thing real in the world is love. Everything we see that is not love – the violence, the genocide, the poverty, and starvation – all of it is an expression of fear, which is merely an inaccurate perception of reality. Just because someone walks into a crowded theater and begins shooting does not make the perception that inspired this action accurate. The action may be physically real, but the perception is not. The only thing real is love. Our job is not to change the world. Our only job is to perceive the world as it actually is.
And that would be it. I know that this is an odd last blog for what is billed as a blog for writers, but all my work has pointed me to this single truth. What is writing, after all, but the translation of a perception? A story is not what happened, but a version of what happened, a perception of what happened. And so the question: What version of the story should I tell? What feels like the most valuable perception I could possibly share?
Which is why my last blog would not be about writing but about love. But it’s not my last blog. I still love to write them, and so I do. I don’t know when I will write my last blog, except to know that it will be the day I wake up and realize I don’t love writing them anymore. It is quite possible that will be the day I don’t wake up at all.
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