Sometime ago I started with the goal of trying to write once a week.  On occasion I do not, but generally I have been able to adhere to it.  This week I nearly missed.

The goal had a simple premise behind it:  we should spend our lives doing what we enjoy, that if we are not careful we won’t, and we will find it all slipped away.  Surely I could come up with something human to write about once a week, I thought.  Surely being human is a common experience.

It isn’t, though, and that’s the funny thing.  We tend to hide what most makes us human.  None of us hides it perfectly, and an observer sometimes finds a glance, or movement, or word from us which lets them slip in without our knowing.  These are the moments we try to capture in our photographs, and our writing, and our art.

In these instances the creator generally works to cover it back up again, leaving it to find for those with the eyes to see or ears to hear.  They avoid giving it away for nothing, and maintain respect for whatever it was someone was trying to hide in the first place.

When I wrote about fall in Northeast Iowa, for example, it was about my fear of my father’s declining health.  I tried to get death to subtly work its way in and out of the piece in the topics of divorce, and autumn, and the effigy mounds, not being able to get up the hill, etc.  I took the topics I couldn’t touch on with those closest to me and found a way to share them with anybody and their brother.

I never could quite get it right, but it still lays out there, to take up and edit again, and that’s the wonderful thing about writing.  Most of the words I have said failed when they left my mouth, and the ones I should have used always come to me after the moment has passed.  In the ones I write lie the hope that someday I’ll get ones in the right place at the right time.

A couple of days later, Dad was back up on his feet again, and I was off on other topics.  If I don’t watch it, the piece will get away from me, and Dad will too.

Now on occasion we run into people not playing the same game the rest of us are.  They feel no need to make it look like everything is under control.  Or if they feel that need for everyone else, for some strange reason they don’t feel they have to with you.  I ran into one this week.  The subtle hints were gone, and I was hit over the head with what it was like to be human.

In doing so it stripped away my own subtly, my dry wit and confidence and left in their wake the anxious little boy of my youth, naked and knobby kneed.  I was embarrassed and I was certain I’d be abandoned for it.  I wasn’t.  The boy I couldn’t accept, they accepted just fine.  I hope I had done the same for them.

It should be so rare in life, and if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have felt so remarkable.

Typically I write the words I’ve paid a price for.  But the only price for these was a little embarrassment, and what I got in return was far more valuable.  I had got the better end of the deal, and for that I owe.

It seems the only way to pay the debt is to do it for someone else, and that advice I offer freely to anybody and their brother.

“Life is messy,” they said.  Yes, and sometimes our maintaining it isn’t only makes it worse.  We miss out on all the good things that come from getting caught not having our shit together.