INSITEVIEW- - tom shugart's weblog

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Respecting My Juniors

Thanks to Elaine who writes to suggest that I check out Tom Bolton's post, "The Moment." She cites it as an excellent example of the kind of self-revealing writing she'd like to see more of from male bloggers.

Bolton taps--beautifully--into a fundamental source of our individual power: our ability to assign our choice of meaning to the individual moments of our lives. He makes the distinction between "life" and "existence:"

" life is about more than unconnected moments. The moments that make up a life, as opposed to an existence, do not merely fall by coincidence next to one another, randomly, asserting their own force upon us. We form the moments of our lives. We string them together connecting them like beads on a necklace, or like the threads of a fabric weaving them into something that becomes not an existence, but a life."

Then, noting his pleasure as he strings together just such a necklace while café-sitting, then walking down the street, he adds:

" these experiences bear the imprints of moments past, present and future. Those imprints color, inform, and even create this moment. They make the moment something of my own subtle and extended creation. I flow through the moment into the next and the next and the next, feeling the progression like the melody of a beautiful song I’ve never heard before. Each note follows beautifully yet not quite predictably from the one before it and into the one after."

Good stuff, no? Tom is my latest addition to my blogroll, and I'm looking forward to more good reads. Thanks again to Elaine for clueing me in.

Elaine further writes that, recently, she's been discovering a number of younger male bloggers who are wonderful writers and very adept at revealing their feelings. I write back to Elaine (my contemporary):

" I agree with you. Some of these young guys are terrific. My wife, who administered early childhood education programs for twenty years, said she started noticing a big change in the quality of the fathers during the mid-90's. "90's men," she called'em--sensitive, caring, sharing equally in the care of the young children.

My theory is that it's what the modern woman expects. Having achieved economic self-sufficiency, she can now demand these characteristics from any man who aspires to have her in wedlock. Men will fall all over themselves to be the way the gals want 'em to be. So, if the women are resolute in standing up for what they want from us, both they and we benefit. And the results are showing up in part through the exceptional words of some of these young male writers."

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