Permit me to engage in a moment of self-indulgence. I promise I won’t do it often.
We all dream of doing important things when we’re kids. We collect rocks and sticks and shells, or capture tadpoles and caterpillars to watch them transform, and we are scientists. We bang on pots and pans, and we are drummers. We send away for secret decoder rings and we are spies. We make helmets of ice-cream buckets and spacecraft of refrigerator boxes and we are astronauts. We twirl for hours in the sun and we are dancers. We learn first aid and we are doctors.
And all along the way, those who are older and wiser remind us, again and again, like the genie in the bottle, “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”
(That’s if we’re lucky enough to have parents and families and communities that don’t undermine our ability to dream of anything that isn’t in The Script we’re supposed to inherit. But even those poor souls can manage to dream–some of them, quite beautifully. )
If we are very lucky, we get to live our dreams. And that is when the words of the genie come back to us. “Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.” Along with the dream comes hours and hours of thankless tasks. Begging for funding. Competing with colleagues. Hours of practice. And, always, mounds and mounds of paperwork. And that’s if everything goes right.
But nothing goes right all the time. Hypotheses are wrong. Musical tastes change. The intelligence is bad. Space shuttles crash. Accidents leave us paralyzed. Patients die.
We have to make sense of both why we succeed and why we fail–otherwise, we can’t live with ourselves.
And that’s where writers come in. They’re the ones who’ve been observing us as we go about our daily business. They’re pretty detached as friends, family members, colleagues, lovers. They don’t pitch in much. That’s why they often come across as unfriendly, unlikeable, even self-involved. They’re often penniless and seem not only lazy, but arrogant, as they ask us for help, again and again, in sustaining their meager existences.
But one day we’re going to stop all that activity and start looking for the meaning in what we accomplished. And that’s when the writer finally gets to do her or his job. All the while we thought s/he was detached and unavailable, s/he was listening carefully to every word we said, watching everything we did. S/he cared about our daily struggles all along, found meaning in the activities we considered boring or routine, and knew we were too busy with our daily lives to pause and reflect on the significance of it all. So s/he wrote it all down for us. And now, to help us find our way through our confusion and our search for answers, s/he holds up the magic mirror that shows us everything.
Behind that mirror, the writer disappears. And all that’s left is a mirror image of us, all of us, in our struggle to achieve and to know and, finally, to understand.
Photo credit: tomato umlaut, Flickr.com