We Could Send Letters

You said you're free, for me that says it all. You're free to push me and I'm free to fall.--Roddy Frame

Blogging, like so much else in life, is subject to the laws of habit and inertia. Just as one sees number patterns everywhere when one plays a lot of Sudoku, if one blogs regularly, everything is a potential blogpost. But take a break and it seems almost impossible to start up again and, if one spends too much time thinking about it, it starts to seem a bit ridiculous ("I am supposed to put numbers in boxes? I will be doing this for fun? And there are people out there who actually, occasionally, care about my opinion on Hello Kitty, the world we live in and life in general? No way.")

Which is my roundabout way of saying that this is harder than it looks. It would be easy to abandon this blog for my "real" life, except that in recent weeks, I have had reminders that this blog exists and that people read it. I have also had reminders of my teenage years, how easy it was to lose touch with people then, but how easy it is to reconnect with people now. Facebook and email has made it possible for people to reach across the span of decades and poke one another.

However, it is only easy to find the people we have lost if those people want to be found. If someone has little to no presence on the internet or if their name is so common as to render them anonymous, the only possibility of finding them again is to hope that they will find you. Which takes us back to the past, to a time when friendship was a matter of having trust and home addresses. And even with all our technology, we run the risk of stumbling upon feelings we left behind.