The Wire Above the Path.

I’ve been intrigued recently by the fact that a couple of old posts from last February have been accessed and read many times by people from all over the world. Why? They’re both essentially personal, and can mean little or nothing to anybody but me and the one other person involved in the narrative. Whatever the reason, I read them again. And that brings up the general point.

Reading old blog posts is like looking at old photographs. It’s the process of sliding back along the high wire that’s strung along and above the path of your life. You stop at a certain point and look down. You see who you were then, and what you were thinking, and who meant something to you, and what they were saying, and how you were reacting. You sense again the aspirations, fears, euphoric moments and burning fevers. You reprise the little things like a snippet of conversation, a touch on the arm, or a ten minutes spent leaning on a farm gate, looking across the landscape and wondering what the present state was all about and how it fitted into the jigsaw. Sometimes it embarrasses you, sometimes it saddens you, and sometimes it makes you smile. You see what you gained and lost, because you know how it all developed between then and now.

And I suppose what interests me most is this. If my faith in determinism is correct, the wire that’s strung along the path of our lives goes in both directions from beginning to end and always has, but I doubt that any of us would really want to slide along it the other way.