In a Different Light

“I have said that I don’t know what I should have, and you probably don’t know what you should have. But I think one of the most powerful things we can do for one another is to tell our stories. This is what I have; this is what I give away; this is what I feel is right for me at this moment. But let me really tell you in detail. If we start telling these stories to one another, and if we listen to the stories, I believe healing will take place, and we will be given insight as to what is appropriate and what is right.”

–Gordon Cosby, “How Much is Enough?” in By Grace Transformed

Several years ago I hired a social media specialist to take a look at my Blogspot blog. Several years before that, when I started blogging here, my son helped me with its title--”In a Different Light”. “Light” can be looked at in so many different ways. There’s visible light that allows us to see. There’s ultraviolent light that would kill us except for the earth’s protective ozone layer. There’s the spectrum of light as seen in a prism or a rainbow. There’s light as it travels as a particle and a wave (thanks Albert Einstein). There’s “the speed of light”, 186,282 miles per second. There is the origin of light, our sun, that takes eight minutes to travel from itself to the earth. Then there is the metaphor, to see something in a different light.

The specialist read several of my blog posts and had this to say about them. He did not mean what he said as a compliment; he meant it as a criticism of my writing.  He said, “David, a blog needs a theme, a purpose. It needs to be a blog about dogs or cats. It needs to be a blog about science or photography. It needs a central theme. Your readers need to know what to expect when they open your blog. Your blog is just ‘a slice of life’ “.  After I paid him and after he left, I gave his comment a lot of thought. I considered to just stop writing altogether or to write and not post it to Facebook. And then it occurred to me that the theme of my blog, davidrhelms.blogspot.com, is in fact “a slice of life.”  That’s the way it started with the life and death of my beautiful mixed shepherd, Maggie, and that’s the way it continues today. The central them is me. My experiences past and present, my thoughts, my feelings, my hopes and dreams, my science, my music, my photography, my opinions, my, my, my. So am I a literary narcissist? Is my ego as big as the sun? Isn’t there something my blog could be about besides me, myself and I? Sure, it could be about hundreds of things, but it’s not. When you read “In a Different Light, “ you read about me.

Recently Blogspot changed something important. If its analytics are correct, my readership dropped from several hundred readers to less than twenty. As I stated a few weeks ago here, I again considered “What’s the point of writing if so few will read?” And then my counselor helped me to remember how it started with Maggie’s death.  I was not writing for you; I was writing for me. Isak Dinesen so wisely stated,  “Any sorrow can be borne if it can be made into a story”. Although I have tried to interject into this “slice of life” much joy and humor, a central theme has been my own pain, my own losses and grief.

There are plenty of blogs about dogs and cats, science and photography, children and grandchildren, but you can’t find my “slice of life” anywhere else but here. “But I think one of the most powerful things we can do for one another is to tell our stories.” I hope that at least every now and then reading my stories has been as powerful for you as it has been for me while writing my stories. When I posted recently that I was thinking about hanging it up, a reader from my high school days said after reading the next essay, “If you had stopped writing, then we could not have read that” (what I had just posted that apparently meant something to him).

In the quote above, Cosby said that as we tell our stories, healing takes place. I know that telling them has brought healing for me and I can only hope that my stories have encouraged you to tell your stories and that healing has taken place in you, as well. When we think about it in a different light, we realize that our memories, our stories are all we’ve got.

“A slice of life”, a moving slice of me. All due respect to my social media specialist, but I believe my theme has been useful. It certainly has been useful for me.