We think we know each other on this medium, in this exchange of fact and literature, in this intersection of glacial remoteness and desert-hot revelations. We believe we are safe and completely isolated,warm and completely secure.
But do we really? Do we really know? Do we really know anything? Do we really know anything about one another?
I think so. I think not.
Let’s bridge the gap. Let’s create new chasms.
Write a paragraph in the comments to me, knowing that this paragraph will be read by others who are not on your friends’ lists, and will be an open and public document for all to see.
Write to me a paragraph that will help us all to know you a bit better. I don’t mean the old-school project “write your biography in five paragraphs” or even “write ‘what I did last Summer'” (or even “I know who you are and I saw what you did”). Make your paragraph a moment in time, a slice, a snippet, an edited sample from your life.
We, that is, me and those who read comments to my journal, will read what you write, and take it in, and accept it, and try our best to have fellow feeling with you. You may choose what you write. My only caveat is that a prurience sometimes infects this form of exercise, in which people feel compelled to be participants or voyeurs in a kind of “life pornography”, a sense of reality-show revelation for the prematurely desensitized. My caveat is that while you are free to write as you choose, and what you choose, I and your probable audience have access to enough shock and awe to last a millennium. Sometimes the tragic or the transcendent is essential to the story, as with a person who experienced a trauma or found transport in transcendent romance. So often, though, the “reality paragraph”obscures, rather than revealing, the inner truths within.
Write me your paragraph to show yourself as if you were the steam rising from hot mint tea–at the edge of the tongue, in mid-air, ready to be savored, yet still a mystery.
I will read your paragraph, and taste your fullness, and perhaps you will be a little less lonely in this life. I will not understand you at all, no matter how compelling your paragraph. I understand you already, regardless of your paragraph.
Write in a mad dash, without calculation, as if the words are part of the fabric of who you truly have become.
All Things Considered – 
– 
