Ripples in the mist

I have been gone a long time, and I have no excuses.  I think it's inertia. 

It's also that someone on one of the blogs I follow responded to something I said in such a profound way that I haven't been able to formulate a response.  My grandmother always told me choose my words carefully, that they may never come back to haunt me.  I tried to always think of that when I wanted to say something unkind, but it's clear that I never thought it all the way through.  Sometimes they come back to haunt you in a good way.

There are grand and well planned speeches and there are sound bites, there are quips and questions, plaints and platitudes, responses and rants.  The sheer variety of  the ways in which the human animal communicates is staggering. And now, to add to all the verbalization, we have emails and blogs and boards.  So many times we think that what we're throwing out there goes out into space, hanging in the ether like slowly dissipating bubbles wafting through the darkness until they are too thin to exist anymore and they pop out of existence.

This is not a post about internet privacy.  This is not a post about free speech.  This isn't even a post about a post, in the end.

This is a post about human connection.

Sometimes.... a single sentence can linger, like a note, reverberating.  Even one that you think will be skimmed and tossed aside, the crust of an old bread acknowledged but ultimately useless, fit only to be consumed by the crows until none of the crumbs remain.  How many words do you think we speak in an average day?  Most of them are soap bubbles, admired while they lasted but meant for transience.  Those words have to dissipate, otherwise the world would be so crowded with them that there would not be room for any more.  And that's a good thing.  Most of them are rinds; we have eaten the fruit inside them and only the husks remain.

But a very few are more than that.  Some are keepers - plucked from the air and saved, to be savored.  And the point I want to make is that we don't know when we speak them which ones will be those 'keepers'.  Often they aren't the ones contained in the pretty speeches, in the postulating pontifications so carefully crafted to make us look learned or wise.  Frequently they are there, hiding in a thought or a breath, tossed out lightly to be caught and kept.  The catcher can take them away to inspect them at their leisure, turning them over and over in a hand to see what reflections can be found in each facet.

We may never think we are capable of pronouncing something that someone may find valuable.  And maybe it isn't us that produces it at all.  Maybe those words come from somewhere else, through us.  Maybe it only happens when we find that human connection, whether face to face or across the vast sweeps of cyberspace.

Something in my friend's post moved me, and I posted back, a reach out across the blank dark face of the web.  "Hold on.  The net is larger than you imagine." 

And it is.  We are all in this together.  Those simple words reverberated for her, opening doors that she may not have seen as doors until she stopped to think about them.  And conversely, seeing the ripples from those words through her eyes has made me stop to think about my own. How many opportunities for human connection have I let pass by, drifting past me on the breeze, waiting for me to pluck them out of the air and prize them? 

Walking through life is sometimes a lot like walking through a heavy fog, especially when life is difficult to bear.  When we cannot see, we begin to believe that there is nothing more out there; nothing beyond the short reach of our vision.  The world is reduced to that which we can see just in front of our faces.  It can become lonely and overwhelming very quickly.  "I am all alone in this."  We think.  "How can I bear it?"  But the reality is that there is a whole vast world out there, of course, hidden just beyond our sight where we can neither see nor touch it.  A whole vast world of other people, thinking that they, too, are islands in the mist, stumbling through the whiteness as best they can.  It's easy to feel disoriented in that world.  Sometimes, all it takes is to stumble upon one fellow traveler, who says "Hey!  I am here, too, and we can be lost together."  And with that one voice, the small space of your lostness becomes larger. 

I am vastly thankful for being able to make a difference in someone's life with a very few words, even if just for a short time.  Even though I did not know where and how those words would land. I am glad that hearing one voice in the fog made her space larger.  And the sound of those two voices brought more in. That net... it is larger than we imagine, if we let it be.

Take care with your words.  They ripple.  And they do not always disappear.  But send them out there anyway.  You don't know who might be waiting to catch them.