we can work it out and get it right or say good night

I suppose it is the nature of a writer to start seeing the world with lenses through which she is writing. Maybe. I can only speak for myself. But I do know when I was creating my vampire tome, I started observing the parasitic nature of behaviors. How we feed off of other people’s lives, even if we aren’t literally bloodsucking. It was an interesting frequency to tune in and observe.

Now I’m writing something entirely different. About a friendship… a love story of sorts. I really haven’t decided the one word description yet… because I don’t really know where it’s going. BUT I can safely say it is about relationships. With people we love… and how love is completely selfless, vicious, competitive, forgiving, needy, illogical, enduring… complicated.

So I look up and around these days and I think about how we connect. As friends. As lovers. As spouses. As family. As co-workers. As strangers. As arbitrary assignments of intimacy or a well worn, constantly strengthening discovery of kindred spirits. 

It is pretty universal… and a theme in a lot of literature, of the quest for human connection to override the anxiety of the soul. But… as universal the theme, as omnipresent as it is in our books, on our television sets, on a social networking site to which a vast majority of us are maliciously addicted… it seems we find these connections and forever seek to destroy them.

Such a broad topic – not really one I could conquer in a blog post. It is more the stuff of late night musings with a bottle of wine and comrades to question the befuddling universe. But what prompted me to even start to articulate this was… yet again… my frequent topic of politics.

Merriam Webster gives one definition for politics as: the total complex of relations between people living in society. And it is complicated, isn’t it? Nothing is simple. We fool ourselves to believe all the things over which we debate and refuse to agree are anything close to simple. But we continue to argue and fight over… what? At what cost? To the cost of the more human element of our relationships? To forgo our empathy with friends in a determination that we are more right than them because they see through different lenses?

I know I am part of it. Here. In this blog and elsewhere. I don’t keep quiet about my opinions. I did once, but that… well… I found painful consequences to not being true by silencing my heart. But… I don’t contend my heart is right all the time. It gets angry and wants to understand why… why… why do we say the things we do? Why do we lie and make up stuff to distract from the real problems? Why do we ignore what we need to fix? Why do we always have to blame and sever our allegiance… and break down the relationships between one another and not build them up?

In a world where we are so connected every hour, every minute by some electric pulse of data, how is it we are so divided? Because… really… don’t we all just want the same thing? To not be alone on this rocky road of life? To have some sort of connection… to (totally stealing and bastardizing a quote from Iris Murdoch) know someone else is real.