Not so.

I’ve found out this week that it takes several things for me to produce a piece of self-directed writing. The most important may be the deadline. There are two columns in the paper that must be filled, and they’ll be blank unless I fill them. Plus there’s the even greater pressure of having something together in time for the assistant editor to edit.

Second, and perhaps contrarily, there needs to be enough time for the ideas to form themselves, a process I can only call percolation. This week, for instance, I started thinking about what I would write about on Sunday night. You don’t want to start too early on something like this – a new, more important event may need addressed by the time you go to press. By Monday afternoon I had an idea of what I wanted to do.

But just because something seems like a possible topic doesn’t mean that I can actually get into it. This is where the impostor syndrome really kicks in. A versatile newspaper editor needs to be able to write about anything, right? What am I doing here? None of the topics I thought about actually seemed like something I wanted to address. Most of them could be important issues, but were either more of the same old ranting against the school (something I’m taking a break from until a new issue comes up) or something that I have no strong opinion on. Our editorial column has traditionally been strong on opinion, and I would find it hard to do anything other than an academic essay or research paper on something I’m not strongly opinionated about. Not exactly writing made to convince in five hundred words.

Tuesday evening the idea just fell apart. The supporting material just wasn’t there. I could write something about my experiences coming back from Oxford, but that would just be pretentious. Besides that, I have mixed feelings about writing about personal history and family for the editorial, a topic frequented by my predecessors. And NOTHING was happening this week. No campus scandal to comment on, no big event to talk about. I suppose I could have written about the low quality of the tea in the library. That’s about it.

So I tried to combine a little bit of everything. I needed to get started. The deadline was looming. Beside my own writing, I needed to do first cuts on several stories and make sure everything was in place for the layout and photo editors. But I was putting out disjumbled crap that came to its point in a cliched positive note of positive encouragement. So scratch out most of it, talk about it with a friend on Facebook, and hope something comes together.

It always does.

I am consistently surprised and amazed at how things like this somehow come together. Through the day Wednesday, different thoughts came to mind, starting to piece together something that would both be relatively unique, relevant, and perhaps as importantly, interesting to me. Snatches of sentences and paragraphs would come at the most inconvenient times – just after I got into bed, in the shower, during class, in the bleachers at chapel. And down they’d go in my notebook. By early afternoon there was the glimmer of possibility. I just needed to get the right atmosphere to finish it.

About three-quarters of the way through, I hit a wall. I was being distracted as things in the office started to get underway. My thoughts were going nowhere. It wasn’t done, but it would have to wait. And wait. And wait. I was afraid the editors would be after me to finish it, but they had plenty of other stories to work on.

Finally, half way through the evening, I took it and finished it. Everything came together. There was little him-hawing about the topic, or my opinion, or what I was trying to say. Somehow, the pieces came together. Still, it was rough. I wasn’t sure if I said anything like I meant to say. But that’s why editors are so important.

This whole process mystifies me. How do ideas just come together? And why don’t they come together any sooner? Is it simply a lack of practice? It could be, but I’ve talked with other people, who say that oftentimes the words and thoughts put themselves together. They just seem to bubble up from nowhere. But they come from somewhere.

Percolation, I call it.

(On the other hand, I wrote this in less than a half hour. Go figure.)

Strand of American flag lights? Fifty cents at your nearest flea-market.

Central Florida is heaven for your junk collectors, deal snatchers, and general social flea-marketers.

Blue skies belie the chill in the air on the last Wednesday morning of the year.

Junk or treasure? You never know what you'll find

Remember the mad rush for these, a number of Christmas seasons ago? Now collecting soot in somebody's basement.

Yes, there is a stuffed black bear in the back of this semi-permanent vendor's booth.

And just in case we're not sure that we left England - large knives for sale in the open air.

These ones were behind glass, however.

As were these fancy timepieces.

And just in case you wanted to stop in for those American Flag lights, here's the street sign.

Those of us who have been away for the one semester think we’ll have it rough coming back to our friends and family, for whom life has gone on without us. We have to readjust to driving on the right side of the road; to smiling at people on sidewalks (to saying “sidewalks” instead of “pavements”), and not cycling everywhere. Our friends’ lives have gone on, some have graduated, some have made new friends, and others have just changed. We see things differently, our opinions have changed, and we’ve made new friends. But it’s not anything like what people like Ben experience.

Ben is a quiet guy, but not antisocial. During the flight we talked about travelling, foreign currency, being away, coming home, and the differences between Here and There. This man has been everywhere across the Near and Middle East. Pulling out his billfold, he showed me currency from Taliban Afghanistan, current Afghanistan, old Iraq, new Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and five or ten other random countries. He is something of an amateur collector now; he brings back foreign monies for his daughter.

He talks to me about how different life is in Afghanistan. He’s going to have to reacclimatize to a place of rules. Even things like speed limits and stop signs. We comment on how we take such things for granted. Most Americans can’t even conceive of living without these structures. They are taken as having a real existence. Put an average person in Afghanistan, where the rule of law is not to be counted on, where life is lived much more by the seat of one’s pants, and they’d freeze out of inability to cope. Ben has lived there for at least two years, probably more. If those of us who have lived away for three months think it’s disconcerting coming back to America, Ben must be completely disoriented.

Most relationships are built on day-to-day interactions. Even good friends have little to speak of when they don’t have shared experiences. Coming back, most of us who have been away will have to rebuild relationships, try to fit in with our old friends and find new ones. But we’ve only been away three months, and most of us have FaceBook to keep us connected. Ben has only seen his daughter once in the last two years. The hard thing, for him, is that she doesn’t know anything different, while he knows how much is lost. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to be around her, without having the shared experience that is the basis of relationships. He’s going back to someone who probably barely knows him, who he barely knows.

We, Ben and myself and many others who are coming back from living in distant lands, are, to different degrees, strangers at home. Even as welcomed as we might be, and if we have jobs or school to reintegrate us into society, and no matter how long we’ve lived in the States before, coming back we are something of outsiders. Some might describe it as being a citizen of the world. Perhaps that is true for a few. For others, it is simply being other, different, again. From being strangers abroad, we become strangers at home.

“No, but you have more of them.”

“Yes, and they’re faster, too.”

The old regulars Sit Talk
in the bay window. Light
streams in from the moon
-lit night while in the dark
recess a long beard picks,
strums and in the corner
leaning I watch it all

going

knowledge drops like a weight in the pit
of my being. the end is near. prophets told it.
Names never before known, after seen
Life flat-lines as a heart meter
unplugged. and the memories are wheeled away

To live in the bliss of ignorance
that today is the last day. dream
of your curly hair of secrets
boisterous laughter of brown sugar
comic arrogance of sarcasm
wit, love, smarts, arts, life
that i’d never leave

Castle across from the town of Penzance

Hegel and I went to the sea
in a beautiful royal blue train.
We forgot to grab the PB&J
wrapped up in a paper towel.
I looked out at the landscape around
and read little Hegel
“O incomprehensible Hegel! O Hegel my nemesis,
what a thick writer you are,
You are,
You are!
what a thick writer you are!”

With apologies to Edward Lear.

Just outside Oxford

This was a pretty heavy week, and since I have a rail pass laying around needing used, I thought it would be the perfect time to take a trip to nowhere in particular just for the joy of riding the train and going to new places. So I picked the end of the line in Cornwall, Penzance. Its as far south west as one can go in England on the train. I left on the 10:00 train from Oxford, changed at Reading, and then it was a straight shot down. The sun came out as we pulled out from Oxford, highlighting the golden greens that make early autumn in England so beautiful.

Plymouth from the train

Along the way we rode along the coast, through tunnels in the cliffs along the beach, through Plymouth and myriad smaller towns along the rail line.

Penzance is at the end of the line, so there I disembarked from the train and went out to walk on the quay. It was quite cold, with a blustery breeze coming in from the ocean. The town is medium size, with plenty of older houses and shops on the main streets. The church is built on the hill in the center of town and towers over the wharf.

Penzance

The quay was almost deserted. Tourist season was obviously long gone. A small restaurant was open across the street, and I saw that they had a 2 quid special – sausage and chips. The place was empty, but the cook and waitress took my order and preceded to batter and fry the sausage and chips. I asked about the town, she said that fishing was down from what it used to be. “The French are getting all the fish. In case you haven’t noticed we don’t care too much for the French. And they probably don’t care for us too much either.” So much for the international community.

An attempt at tropicality

After the rather satisfying dinner, I sat on a bench on a sidewalk overlooking the harbor and read about Hegel for an hour or so, before heading back down to the train station. The streets are lined with palm-tree like plants, but this isn’t Miami. By the time the train left it was almost dark, so I pulled out the Hegel commentaries and got back to work. The five hour trip back to Didcot Parkway was spent listening to Tyrone Wells and Jack Johnson, occasionally dozing, and putting up with the gaggle of middle-aged women, acting half drunk, who led boisterous conversation in the middle of the carriage for a few stops. And taking notes on Hegel. After the train transfer there was a half-hour trip back into Oxford, where I reclaimed the cycle from the racks and headed back up the hill. I got back before midnight, to find an apple pie just coming out of the oven. Not a bad day.

The equivalent tickets, bought online, would have been 84 Pounds, which translates to $133. So one more trip like that and I’ll have gotten the full monetary value of the pass, and I still have 3 days left on it to use in the next two months. And trains here are quite nice. Like all things British, stations are well marked. The seats in standard class (on First Great Western) are comfortable but not amazing. The trains were more or less full depending on which stations we were between, for many, probably most, people get on and off at points between the ends of the line. Next trip: maybe up to Scotland, maybe for overnight. But there’s a lot of work between now and then…

WWII Poster rediscovered in 2000

“Keep Calm and Carry On.” This slogan, from what I hear, is from a World War II poster, and was to be used in case of the invasion of Britain, but only saw limited distribution.

It’s easy enough to say. “Keep calm and carry on” just rolls off the tongue, setting a rather British attitude that implies strength and dignity under duress. Does this slogan really apply when things get really bad?

When tragedy strikes, it seems more than a bit trite. You can’t tell someone to keep calm, unless you are trying to ignore the reality of grief. Carrying on is something that only happens gradually, a slow reckoning with life.

Yet so often that is what we tell people in grief, or more painfully, are told by those well meaning people around us. Those are the words of people who are avoiding the real question. When you’re grieving, you know, during your more rational moments, that things will carry on. They just do. But you can’t tell someone that.

What can you say? Nothing really. To those right in the middle of it, almost anything seems trite, superfluous. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch.” If this is what Christ wanted from those closest to him when he was faced with the deepest grief ever borne, how can we offer more to those we love when they are in the shadow of death?

Thus much I’ve learned. There isn’t anything that you can do. When your loved ones are grieving, sit down and keep watch. Life will carry on. It always does, somehow, but that’s not important now. Don’t be scared by grief. We’re scared of silence. We’re scared of just sitting there, not doing anything. Don’t be. Grievers just want you to be there. When there’s nothing to be said, shut up. Silence is not awkward. Sometimes it’s poignantly appropriate. Don’t ask “how are you doing?” You know the answer. Just be there. “Keep Watch and Hold Me.” That’s the griever’s slogan.