This week’s best-read posts — the only ones to make it online, actually — were all 44 years old. I hadn’t even begun my writing career, but I was already agonizing over it.
That’s what writers do.
“Mr. Fielding meets his dream house” was a random journal entry prompted by an article about passive solar homes. That led me to think about my dream home. That brought me to movies that I watched that day, in which I found writing inspiration. I shared it to show how this writer’s mind works — or did four score and four years ago.
“Dream boat in irons” was a short one about knowing that I was going nowhere, into the wind. Another recurring dream still have is trying to speak and being unable to: “I can’t find the words.” Every writer’s nightmare.
“The turning point” was longer and uncomfortably personal. It dealt with the decision every young adult will make sooner or later to strike out on one’s own. Every life has many turning points like this. My decision took me on a side road for a few years but eventually back on what has been a course in one main direction.
There’s a theory about time and space that time is not linear, moving from one point to another.* It’s more like a fabric, with a ball moving along the surface as gravity pulls it down. Any movement of the fabric, from any direction, will move the ball without touching it. If time works like that, then changes in our life paths, and in world history, don’t always come from the past. They could be course corrections resulting from an event in the future, something that needs to happen to get us there.
I’ve seen this several times in my life, and in the lives of my family. What we may see as a stroke of luck, good or bad, may actually be a course correction. In a complex system, we go with the flow.
Speaking of time, and fabrics, and family, I’m about to wrap up my report on the Bubble Wrap back story. It’s long and illustrated with links to patents so readers can follow along. I’ll release it as a serial starting sometime this week. Stay tuned!
*In “Doctor Who,” The Doctor rarely attempts to describe the complexities of time. One of the 10th Doctor’s most famous quotes agrees that time is not linear. It’s made of “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey … stuff.”