I took the above photo yesterday, just after hanging out the clothes. Look at that sky! You can almost feel the warmth, the scent of wattle in the air. It was also a public holiday for us Victorians, even better, thanks to a certain horse race. We were out in the garage doing a family circuit (will explain another time) when the gates for the Melbourne Cup were thrown, and I walked over to turn up the radio to listen.
‘Let’s go inside to watch it on the television,’ said Keira. ‘It’s better on there.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it’s more exciting listening to it on the radio actually. You have to concentrate more, really listen, and a lot rests on the expertise of the caller. Television does a lot of that hard work for you.’
Listening. Imagining. Visualising.
What does it mean?
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I’ve been wondering in what ways I’ve been stepping back from this space. I’m still here, obviously, but sometimes I think I’ve put up a kind of screen; you can still see me through it; my movements, although seen, are shadowed and blurred. I’m as honest, well-intentioned and faithful to the telling of a story as ever, but I am getting more and more choosy as to what those stories that end up on here are. In some ways it’s because constructing those vignettes or scenes are quite time consuming, but that’s not the whole situation. It’s true, the bloggers I prefer to read are the more ‘old fashioned’ kind, those who still make the effort to do just what I’ve just described. And I wonder if they’re a dying breed. Or if we’re a dying breed, if I dare to include myself among their number. Nowadays when I open my reader, I’m struck by the number of tips, tricks, tweaks, life hacks, tutorials, how-tos-and-can-dos in the theme or thrust of many blog posts. At conferences or in business books, we’re told to ‘be’ the expert we want to be perceived as for branding reasons, but if all personal bloggers do that then we’re cutting out the heart of what we do and how we do it so well. A story without a heart is no story at all. And sure – vulnerability is sexy these days. But ‘weakness’ is not, and there isn’t much of a difference between the two. Interpretations are subjective. It can be very confusing!
So what has this got to do with me? Because I’m feeling lost. I’m approached these days to write for the very sorts of campaigns that ask me to teach and inform, and these I do, but I’m finding it hard to regain balance, to bring back the ‘personal’, the ‘me’.
Blogging has become a lot about the ‘visuals’, just like television. I need to shut my eyes, push my ear back up to the radio, and reconnect with the ‘voice’. My blogging voice, that is. Go back to those simple questions: What do I want to say? What is the best way of saying it? How can I do it better?
Actually, they’re not simple questions at all. They’re bloody big ones, aren’t they?
