Bloggers are Boring Unless They are Dying

Bloggers are Boring Unless They are Dying

By Jane Tawel

For years I have been gently poked and prodded by my husband and friends to start a blog. Take this you all! Ugh! I do not want to do this.

I want my first novel and a small discrete book of poems to be published on beautiful, hard bound paper in a book with no “e” in front of it, that you can hold in your hand, an actual shelvable thing that requires you to quietly turn pages, and that smells like a tree chopped down for good reason. Or, if not today, then I want to be published after my death and maybe after I cut an ear off or something. I want to be famous for the life-changing, deep, funny yet poignant thousand page- turner novels that are, after making the Oprah scene, taught in university level literature classes. I want to matter in ways large and far-reaching.

Bloggers don’t matter. Bloggers are boring, self absorbed, “what I ate for breakfast”, whiney, argumentative, unemployed wanna- be writers. (Is that why my friends and husband think I will make a good blogger? Mirror check!)

Then I tripped on someone’s blog posted on facebook (where people who can’t write, post whiney, argumentative, “what I ate for breakfast, lunch, dinner and saw the person sitting next to me eating” boring posts). This blog was about dying. (www.mundanefaithfulness.com) And I paused.

I have learned that epiphanies, for me anyway, come often in life’s pauses. Some of my epiphanies have come after the baby is born and I am home alone watching reruns of “Magnum P.I.” (it was his legs that got to me). The light bulbs frequently went off, when I was forced to walk with a bum knee, not run, when I was kept waiting over forty-five minutes by a friend, when I was unemployed or cleaning out the refrigerator or when I didn’t have a boyfriend (before marriage, not after I am happy to report). Pauses are boring and can be whiney as well. They can also be life changing.

So how appropriate that my epiphany that it was time to become a boring blogger came in a pause in my life (same ole 9-5, same ole family stuff, same ole face and body, same ole world). The blog thing might be just a wee pause and nothing more.

I hope some of you will read my pauses here in my little “Blog-world”, but if not that’s okay. Because maybe if I am the only one who reads my posts for their life changing content, that will be enough. Because just maybe personal epiphanies are enough.

I hope you are taking seriously the pauses in your own life. There is nothing to do in a pause but be in it. Don’t fight it. And don’t think the epiphany will come at your beck and call. Sometimes a pause is just a boring moment, however long that moment may last. Sometimes those pauses last for years. But even a boring moment is still a moment in which to be alive –and still being alive is worth blogging about.

Some day I may have the great good gift to be aware and awake in that Ultimate Pause, The Death Pause, that quintessential pause I hope to live in, that special time between when the Great Event of This Life ends and the Next Great Event of the Future Life begins.

You will excuse me if I blog about it? And maybe if I don’t. I might be a bit busy pausing.