For many years I saved boxes and boxes of other people's writing especially articles from newspapers and magazines. Sometimes the subject interested me. Other times there was a beautiful photograph. I especially liked a well written article.
After a while there were quite a few boxes of these sorted into file folders by subject. The largest file, however was usually the one with a miscellany of articles to be sorted or something.
As long ago as High School someone asked why I didn't write my own things instead of saving other peoples. He had a point.
Occasionally for a short period of time I wrote a few words down and typed them up. Sometimes I would feel like writing about something I had either seen or heard or felt. I would type these up on a typewriter and sometimes revise and retype them eventually several times. Hard work when your just doing it for yourself.
Later, I put these on a floppy disk but the laptop computer had a virus and 177 pages were 'stuck' on the disk until one of my nephews rescued them a couple of years ago.
For a while the only subject guaranteed to get a visceral and often explosive rant from me, verbally or on paper, was Politics. I sometimes felt that if someone pushed a button, I could go on forever. Fortunately, this became boring, even to me, eventually. I am sure those around me had had enough long before I did.
Like you, I think about a lot of things in the course of a day. Upcoming events like a family dinner tomorrow are on my mind today. I'll be seeing my niece dance again later in the month. Meanwhile, there is unusually gorgeous weather here and I already have tan lines on my feet because I wore sandals for two days. I have a lot to do today to get ready for tomorrow, and get a lot of stuff done which I need to do today, including getting food blessed and making time for some quiet reflection at church and many other things.
Earlier this week I replied to one of the people in the Google circle after she had put a lovely quote on her blog site, as quite a few people do on the sites I have seen so far. We e-talked a bit about where we live and what we were doing with a 5 hour time zone difference. I told her I was writing prose essays. She said she didn't do that. From the great things she had to say to me, I can't see why not.
I wanted to tell her that years ago, when my late husband was given a cousin in New Zealand's address, as well as, that of a childhood friend who now lived in Australia; he wondered what he could write to them about. I suggested, he write about his daily life or routine or a description of something around here. I thought that this would probably be so different than their lives in another hemisphere that it would be of interest to them. How right I was.
When the New Zealand relatives write and show me a photo of their garden with a very tall single stemmed flower with a orange fuzzy top that is the centrepiece of their garden, I am fascinated.
When one of the Australians tell me they just had to fish a big spider out of their pool and take it to some government office, I remember what Bill Bryson said in his book, In a Sunburnt Country, about the types of poisonous critters in Australia. Incidentally, my friend seemed pretty calm about the spider even though she grew up in Britain. Her life, years earlier in Rhodesia must have been interesting too.
See what I mean. The money is different, the life is different, the language is different. The terrain and wildlife are different. What people eat every day is different.
When looking at a week's groceries for a family of four in various parts of the world in the book Hungry Planet**, at the very least, I'll bet all of them don't eat a bowl of processed cold cereal for breakfast, as we might here in North America.
Some of the people I have just met on Google live in the middle of Brazil, others in places, no kidding, I have to look up. Their lives would probably be very interesting to me and a lot of other people. Their ideas and beliefs would be interesting to hear about.
If nothing else, like my husband and his friend, you can wonder what Poutine is (since my husband didn't think to ask almost anybody else here in Canada).*
Meanwhile you have a conversation and an exchange of information and often ideas. Best of all you will have written something of your own. You are writing about the life around you, even when you are just describing some small event that was part of your day. Probably to you its just an everyday thing, to some of us though, it is new and interesting and fascinating. Why not give it a try. I would be delighted to hear from you.
*Poutine is a Canadian dish (originally from Quebec), made with french fries, topped with brown gravy and cheese curds.
**Hungry Planet, What the World Eats - by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio.
30 families, 24 countries, 600 meals.
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