In French “essay,” means “attempt” or “trial,” or so some teacher once said to me.
I do not think anything I have ever written here qualifies. Taking on Friendship or Conscience or Experience, as did Montaigne, the inventor of the form, is beyond me. This is a place for posts, for writing stuck to the side of the internet, writing someone would pull down after a day or two were hyperspace real, the news (or newsworthy) equivalent of “cat missing.”
Once upon a time, an essay was to be impermanent and grasping. Oddly it became the chief form of polemic and now students around the world suffer under their belief it must be perfect. Meanwhile, posts seek to go viral. Human beings do nothing so well as convert their impulses into doctrine.
My impulse is that the world could use a realignment spiritually, educationally, and economically, a realignment in how we take in and respond to all that is going on around us too. We’ve fallen into an ocean of knowing (and misknowing) and we have to learn how to swim. I want to keep writing about that.
But not that only.
Last night, sitting at a bar, I met a woman who, along with her husband, adopted two troubled teenagers years ago. She and her husband were in their twenties at the time and now those two kids are almost forty and not doing so great. “But alive,” she said. She and her husband also had two children of their own, one of whom killed himself a year ago. “I try to get out,” she said. “My husband used to be able to sit still. Now he moves all the time, from work to home, dinner to dishes, and back and forth over and over.” She offered a heroic smile.
All the words, all the doctrines, all the knowings. News is everywhere.