Imagine How You'll Feel...

I have become one of them. Only when life is calm, or lends itself easily to an entry, do these people write new entries. It's frustrating when you've begun reading someone's page and then they are absent for days, weeks, months! As someone who has kept a diary since age 8, I can attest that a blog, like a journal, is thrilling at first. You vow to write every day so as to later look back at all the things that have faded out of memory. But after a day, a week, a month, life crowds the words out and all you're left with is a cheesy notebook cover 98% full of blank pages. Oh, the waste! Now, if you ever become famous, you will have to fabricate your memoirs, piecing together what once was, with what you now imagine it was. It's bad enough to let yourself down with an empty diary, but a blog. (Okay, not this one, since to my knowledge, very few people even know about it or have even ventured to the location - and by the way, it seems a silly thing to mention, to promote, so I admit that part of it is that I've not made it a point to point it out.) But when the authors of two blogs I read fail to post, on that rainy day when I craved a diverting look into another world besides my own, I am sad. And mad. And then I move on quickly, because I have other things to do. There is always a book to read. A meeting to schedule. A piano to play. A kitchen to clean. A friend to call back.

Last night I finished an interesting (ultimately dry with a disappointing conclusion) one called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It speaks to the amazing capability that humans have to imagine what they will feel like if something should happen. Although, this process is flawed, because usually our imagination leaves out important details of the experience we will have when a thing comes to pass. As someone who has reacted sometimes very differently to certain things than what I would've imagined, and then wasn't able to communicate my reaction very well at all to those who it affected (to a pretty devastasting outcome, actually). I thought the book would be better titled "Stumbling on Unhappiness", because it largely spoke of things that we think will make us happy but don't, because we haven't imagined out our lives well enough to see that they won't resolve our dissatisfactions.

I like to read a non-fiction book now and again, if only to remind myself that life can be analyzed through research as well as through plot and characters, because frankly, I forget. My next book, though, is back to fiction to read Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow. He comes very highly recommended. While deciding which children's book to give a friend for her upcoming baby shower (guests were charged to bring their favorite book from childhood), I've been re-discovering all my old favorites. Of course, the books one thinks of are the common ones: Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, The Little Engine that Could, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But I think I've found a gem that no one else will bring. I can't tell it yet, just in case. My favorite book, which I've already given her, is the lovely story of Swimmy, with endearing illustrations by Leo Lionni. Children's books really can be lovely, and with so few words. This morning, looking at one, I wished I was a kindergarten teacher or something so I could read them all day long, and see the children's faces as they listened.