Listen to this blog

We walk around inside our own heads, admitting into our world what we see and hear and think.

I’m sitting at a corner table in a restaurant where I start my day these days, writing for hours, sipping decaf coffee, shaping a new work. I rely on blocking out the ambient noise around me, the conversations at the other tables, even the music in the background. Except today at an adjoining table, a new, friendly host is table-hopping and has stopped to share his past and present with the diners, doing what I suspect his job description includes: making friends with the customers. But today for me, his conversation is intruding. For some reason I’m not able to block out his life and work history that he’s sharing. I want him to go away so I can return to my world which flows out as words on a page. When I’m writing, I rely on being self-centered in my own world of words until I have to join the world around me. It is a process most writers know well, taking in the world, then blocking it out long enough to reshape and craft it in words.

In the newspaper this morning—a real newspaper I’ve asked for—I read about the existential protests in Iran and also citizen protests in my own country with crackdowns on peaceful dissent, even some of the same rhetoric about “traitors.” While there are not wholesale killings in the U.S., there have been shots fired and people killed. This is not my daily world; there are no protests where I am, but I have covered protests before as a journalist. In Iran these are now hard to follow since the government has closed down the internet and communications. I rely on Iranian friends who have some direct contact with those in the country to know that the nationwide uprising may be more existential than in the past with protests in more than 100 cities among widespread citizenry—shopkeepers, students and farmers.

I can only write about those I know or know about—the writers who try to get the word out but often end in prison themselves (see Writer at Risk column this month and other months.)

We live in our minds first and then in our families, work, communities, sharing what’s in our minds, the world as we see it with others. In functioning societies, that sharing of thoughts and perspectives leads to education, commerce, friendships, productive government, but when the thoughts of others are not respected or valued, when we lose sight of the multiple, varied, millions of points of view that have to be synthesized to make up a functioning society, we become isolated, frightened and angry. Those who understand how to hold the whole together seem as rare as figures in history these days and yet as common as a child, or a dog walking down the street sniffing and welcoming everyone she meets. I have such a dog. I watch with admiration and a little awe at how willing she is to greet everyone, often sniffing them shyly until they look down and give her a smile and then a pet and she sidles closer then looks over her shoulder at me as if to say, “See, we’ve made another friend.” She lets them pet her, accepts their smiles and even gratitude for her welcoming presence.

The world is more complicated than a child’s or a dog’s affection, but I am daily reminded how much they understand and carry in their heads that we might learn from.