A Small Task, but Necessary

We are living in a time of loss.  Some of us far more than others.  Even those so fortunate as not to have lost loved ones, our own health, or our income in this pandemic have lost physical community. 

I, despite being a thorough introvert, feel that loss of physical community acutely.

I couldn’t be more grateful for Zoom . . . or more tired of having a screen between me and people I care about.

But beyond all that, there is another quieter loss I face into every day.  Surely others are facing it, too.  I’ve found it difficult in this strange time to keep my sense of meaning intact.

For most of my adult life an evolving story drew me out of bed every morning.  That story gave my days shape and purpose and meaning. 

For many of these past months, though, no story has been waiting.  Much of the time, even this blog has slipped from my grasp.

Ideas fly through my mind, ideas for blogs, ideas for stories.  They come when I’m walking, folding laundry, chopping onions . . . petting the dog.  But that is precisely what they do.  They fly through and are gone.

Leaving behind nothing at all

And spinning words out of that nothing feels like the bleakest exercise of all.

Recently a fellow writer expressed my own dilemma when she said, “I feel a great need to write about something important.”  Something important enough, we agreed, to matter in this fraught time.  Being unable to take hold of what that would be, she has stopped writing.

I, too, struggle toward something important that I can’t name.  Can it possibly be another story of a middle-class white child’s angst?  Not that the angst doesn’t matter to the child, but what possible use can it be to this collapsing world?

The need to be writing about “something important” has turned me to nonfiction in recent years.  Enormous topics like the creation of our universe, like the tension between science and religion, like life’s beginnings and endings and beginnings again captured in picture books. 

The first was published as The Stuff of Stars.  The other two are making their slow way into the world. 

I have also begun a new ready-to-read series called Our Universe. 

All that is work I love.

But story lies at my core.  I began spinning stories inside my head long before I could put words on a page, and story has always occupied great swaths of my waking mind.  (More mind-space than is useful sometimes.  When my partner and I are driving somewhere and the silence grows too deep, she will say to me in a mildly accusing voice, “Are you writing?”) 

Stories have been my bedrock.  Always.  They connect me with other human beings, teach me what I know and what I believe about what I know, make sense out of a random world

But during this time of loss, even other people’s stories began to come up short for me.  For months, I immersed myself in nonfiction because every novel I entered seemed to miss the mark.  At least it missed my mark.  Only recently have I begun to live inside others’ stories again, and even so only a very special kind of writer, a very special kind of story will do. 

In the last few months I have made my slow way into a new novel of my own, a young novella.  I am experimenting with form, working in a place halfway between verse and prose, playing with language.  It is play that brings satisfaction and delight. 

This story, called Just Jenny, is, of course, about another middle-class white child’s angst.  That is, after all, the territory I have been given.

But each time I step into Jenny’s world, the questions I’m posing here accost me.

Does this matter?  Really? 

I believe in story.  I have always believed in story.  I believe in it as the vehicle we humans use to find meaning in a life that comes without meaning attached.  And meaning we need, certainly. 

Yet this aching world needs so much more.  So much more than I have either the ability or the strength to give.

I tell myself that this story, the one in front of me right now, is the task that has been given to me.  A small task, but necessary.  Necessary for me, certainly.

Then I take it up with joy and trepidation. 

Always, though, I know it can never be enough.