What you can, when you can, maybe even as badly as you can

 The little guy smiling in this picture turns 16 today. I'm not poet but I stand by this haiku - he still has a smile that is like the sun bursting through the clouds. Cliché for sure, but sometimes clichés are spot on.

When I reread this attempt at a haiku this morning, I was struck by how much memory was contained in these three lines. After 15 years of writing this, I still vividly remember everything connected with it - the day I wrote it, where we were when my daughter took this picture of him, the warm sunshine on a sharp Novemeber day. I remember looking at him barely able to lean forward in his stroller because he was so bundled up, but still leaning forward to watch the antics of his older sisters and laughing as only a one-year-old can. I remember looking at his smile, thinking, “What a wild smile! If he smiled any bigger, his face would split!"” I remember, too, that I was feeling gloomy and petulant and very tired that day, and then he smiled at me with that smile and all that fell away and I laughed. 

Writing preserved the memory for me in a three-dimensioned way. It’s similar to when I (badly) sketched my way through Paris for 8 days. That trip is remembered in a way other non-(badly)sketched trips are not. Photographs from the other trips allow me to remember moments connected with the photos, but writing and sketching actively weave the experience of the entire trip into my memory of it. It's hard to describe, but you probably know what I'm trying to say.

This is meant as an encouragement to mothers, fathers, caretakers of all kinds to write and keep writing. Write what you can when you can, and don't be afraid to write as badly as you can. At this point in my life, I was writing grocery lists, very occasional blog posts, and trying to compose one haiku a week because an author friend was doing it and she encouraged me to try. The exercise bore both expected and unexpected fruit - the bad verse was expected. But the clear and vivid memories of the moments and places of inspiration behind each haiku, that was entirely unexpected and more than worth the effort.

I remember reading several years ago that Socrates was against writing because it would lead to forgetfulness. Here is the quote:

And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.   

- Phaedrus

I don't want to seem like I am correcting Plato, because I am not, but it is worth mentioning that writing as a reminder didn't turn out quite so bad, and that maybe the good side of it is that it pushes back against our tendency toward forgetfulness both personally and culturally (and culturally could be within the culture of our families as well as the larger cultural context). It isn't always because we have something to say to others that is why we write - though clearly, it is that at least; the communication of one mind with another (or many others) is the purpose of writing. But writing also helps ourselves remember. It is also the mind communicating with itself, bringing to mind moments worth revisiting. Sometimes those are the most mundane moments, the most likely to be forgotten, probably because these are the bulk of life. But many experiences of the sublime happen in the midst of the mundane; those moments, for example, when your 1-year-old smiled fiercely at you during an otherwise very rough day and how that smile instantly set the world right-side up.