How Do I Look?

Survey everything with "beginner's eyes," as experience may numb and blind.
--Nikki Heat.

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A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
---Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


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Sometimes I start writing just by sitting down and starting.
     I poke and prod at my idea from one angle,
         then mentally stand up,
             move around,
and poke and prod and ask the same questions,
    then any different questions that the same questions just provoked.

Sometimes, after looking at things from several angles, the overlapping of my views is rather high...which may mean I'm encountering a good idea and need to run with it.

But, that may mean that my thinking is very narrow and I'm just attacking the problem with the same set of tools and expectations from a two-foot different starting point in what will turn out to be a marathon!

But, if my overlap is really minimal...then, there are probably several more good ideas or answers lurking out there, so I go back and mount another assault, starting again with a clean page and pretending I'm somebody else, say, some European great-aunt to whom all my dithering and doodling is profoundly a) interesting b) stupid c) completely off-target d) el bajar y subir de las ondas del mar que le hacen mareada.

Some questions only have one right answer--when tumbled to, all other answers pale into varying degrees of half-truths and out-right errors. Here lies the issue--what if the question doesn't have just one right answer? What if one singer sings a song fast and loud and the second vocalist is soft, slow, and compelling--is one "wrong" and the other "right"? Perhaps it's like a math problem with multiple variables (what did those kind of problems ever do to you to make you hate then so?)--there are sets of answers that are all "correct."

And so, stumbling forward, I look and listen. I look again. Later, I muse, I ponder, I write, edit, and re-edit. Then, all of us, work in hand (and as works in progress), we come together, merging our ideas, discovering harmony at sufficient points of overlap that the music of life emerges.