What Is Forever?
My frustration about having accidentally deleted Sex and the Beach is mounting. Maybe I need glasses; I thought I was deleting another blog I never created, but one whose name I had reserved on Blogger (several in a series of "Sex and ... "). Adding to my frustration is the fact that I had gotten lazy and failed to back up some of my writing.
Things don't really last forever, do they? I am even beginning to wonder if it ever really was an accident. After all, I had already made plans to evolve "Sex and the Beach" into "Sex and Whatever" and leave the past behind. I knew, in my heart, that I did not want to write a single woman's guide to chronic living for the rest of my life because, well, I don't want to grow old and die alone. It's as if, symbolically, I was deleting an old part of me so a new one could be born.
But the sinking feeling, the feeling of self-doubt for that incredibly stupid click, is probably akin to what an author of yesteryear would've felt after losing a single manuscript. Imagine Jane Austen "accidentally" tossing Pride and Prejudice into the fireplace, in some irrevocable gesture of creative suicide.
I never hated my blog. I loved it like some tender bloom that lasted for three years, one that I cultivated with great affection and care. So I have to ask myself: why did this happen?
And this leads to myriad other questions.
What if I were no longer around? Would it mean something for that blog to stay online? So yes, I know I made you cry, I made you laugh and I made you think, but was anyone really "keeping" the blog?
How forever is forever anyway? When the thing you so painstakingly wrote is not in the form of a book that can be passed down literally, generation to generation? Like a diary, for example, or handwritten letters.
People don't read blogs like they read books. They aren't things they keep tucked under their pillows. Blogs aren't oral traditions, either, handed down year after year around the fire. And they certainly aren't manuscripts that get buried in northern African deserts to be found years later by archeologists.
Is the internet really forever, just because it's digital? Is there any greater sense of legacy because you publish online and Google can find you? (And I have no children, so my writing is my only legacy.)
Will some future space archeologist find the "internet" we know today lying just twenty feet above an ancient stone hieroglyph?
This whole experience has really inspired me to question attachment to earthly things and not the kind that may first come to mind -- not cars, not clothes, not food or wine -- but my own creative writing published via blogging format and "things" like social media, Twitter, Facebook, where I'm also very active. How much does all this make up the real me -- the deeper, real me, the self that is close to God, the soul that is forever -- or does much of it just cater to my ego?
In the bigger picture, can I really truly meditate and just let go of EVERYTHING?
I hope Blogger will restore Sex and the Beach. (I'm working on it, believe me.) But even if Blogger doesn't, it will have been a great exercise in patience, forgiveness, spiritual detachment from the ego and letting go.
Actually, it already has been great lesson.
