Writing

At many points in all our lives they might seem incongruous, confusing and disconcerting in many ways.

I find that now at 70 looking back at my life it is as if I have lived 100 very different lives and not just one life.

I wonder how many of you feel this way.

Almost everyone I knew in the 1950s older than me is now dead, my parents, my aunts my uncles, my friends. Basically, from the 1950s I have one cousin I'm still in touch with and another 2 by mail I haven't seen in 20 or 30 years in person.

Watching everyone you know die is difficult to get used to, but, I find that writing often can heal those wounds as they arise by valuing what was good and useful in my life and in all the lives that surrounded me growing up all the way to now.

Now, I have children and grandchildren that I help create continuity for in my life, even though I know likely they too, will have to learn at some point to live without me, (unless some medical miracle arises in my life and yours likely too).

So, as one ages if one can maintain mental and physical and spiritual balance we become continuity for those coming up all around us.

Writing helps us bridge many of these gaps as people pass on we love and often cannot imagine living without.

Eventually, in some ways, if we live long enough most of us are left alone with our memories and our relatives and our friends likely gone with only our children and our grandchildren and their friends and a few relatives left.

So, writing often gives us the chance at self therapy to be able to bridge these gaps so we can stay balanced enough to be valuable to ourselves and others.

Making sense of what was helps us make sense of what is right now. And making sense allows us to go on and not just fragment into a pool on the ground and be gone.

So, writing is a very important tool for many or for all of us to make enough sense of our lives to want to continue living our lives on into the future.

By God's Grace