The Center Stair

It might be the result of age and wisdom, cough, but lately I've been frustrated about how little time there is between the time I prie open my eyes in the dawn and when they fall inexorably shut in the night. It's not that we're signed up for too many activities or that we're trying to do too much in too little time. It's not the various interruptions that throw me off course. It's not even really the modern problem of having so many fancy “time savers” that mean I should be able to do the work of a whole professional laundry, a restaurant grade kitchen, and an upscale office.

All of those factor in but they are not the center of my frustration. No, as usual, it's the Internet.

I was reading Owl at Home quietly to myself yesterday, as I am wont to do. Obviously I should have been reading it out to a child but sometimes I feel like weeping when I'm reading it out, I get choked up and feel like sobbing. Just like with that horribly sad Sarah Plain and Tall book which the children don't like anyway so why do I keep bothering. Anyway, the one about Owl wanting to be both upstairs and downstairs illuminated, as it were, for me the true sorrow of the Internet.

If I'm reading one thing, or chatting with someone on facebook, then I'm not on some other site reading that other thing. And, oh tortured sorrow, if I am reading a book, I am not reading what everyone is posting on Facebook and chatting about–interesting things! shocking things! things worthy of discussion and comment. The rare moments I pick up a book and read it for ten or twenty minutes, are moments when the world has passed me by. But then, after spending an hour busily with my thumbs telling everybody what I think about what I just read, I glance over at my fat solitary library book and feel sad.

Back and forth my mind and heart run, between the two, and I call to myself, “are you over there?” But I'm not, because I'm over here.

Owl, of course, sat down on the center stair, the place in between, which an optimistic person would try to call “balance” or perhaps “perspective” or maybe even “reality”. But I think that the Center Stair is sorrow, loss even. It's saying, “I have lost out on both. I can neither be here nor there. Wherever I am, there is something good that I wanted but couldn't have.”

Have a lovely day! If you like that sort of thing.