It is Yom Hashoah, or at least it was when I began writing this but by the time most of you read it the day will be past and some will ask what happens when no one misses you.
So maybe it is fitting to share part of the Eichmann trial below.
Could take this piece in a dozen different directions and focus on the silent voices of those whose lives were cut short and ask if we lost the doctor(s) who would cured a variety of cancers or other illnesses.
Maybe Diabetes and Pancreatic Cancer would have been eliminated or made manageable and countless families would have had different experiences.
Maybe my Great Grandfather wouldn’t have had to suffer from Parkinsons and lived long enough for me to have met him.
Lots of maybes there and no reason to spend much time focused on those because we’ll never know.
Perhaps we’ll go a different direction entirely and let the music set a tone.
Been Some Big Changes
The Facebook page for this joint started growing exponentially and it made me wonder what was going on because some of the people who started liking the page started reaching out with questions, many of which felt off to me.
The most normal were “how long have you been blogging?” and “why haven’t you updated recently?”
That little sense of something not being right got me wondering but I haven’t had time to really dig in and try to see what I could find out.
So I stopped updating just to see if that changed anything. Stopped writing here to see how that felt and no one asked what happened.
Since I write first for me I wasn’t particularly bothered by the lack of questions or interest. Nor was I surprised, people are busy and this isn’t important to most people.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with someone a while back about world affairs. I said that large numbers of us are fully ensconced in our own worlds with limited interest in what is going on elsewhere.
“If I dropped dead of natural causes or got hit by a bus and died the response from the world would be about the same. A few people would say it was a real shame and then go back to their lives.”
The other guy said I was being too hard and I shook my head.
“My immediate family, close relatives and a few close friends would be really upset but aside from them who is going to run around crying. Think of it like ripples in a pond. The exes wrote me out of their lives or I wrote them out of mine. They might not notice or hear for decades and the further the ripple the less impact.”
So could argue that it just doesn’t matter or that we ought to try to live the sort of life where many would be hurt by our loss.
I lean towards focusing on the small group where I have the greatest influence. If I do enough there it will ultimately impact more people down the road regardless because someone in that inner ripple will do something positive or so we hope.
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Almost a week after prom and a couple of days after determining where my daughter will go to school I am still sorting through the big changes.
Got some in the professional world alongside the personal and a few questions about directions, focus and how hard I’ll allow myself to be pushed.
It’s an interesting thing to wonder if people will miss you. I’ve taken hiatuses as it pertains to social media, sometimes more than a week, and it’s been depressing to realize that no one actually noticed it… or said they wondered but never reached out.
Then there’s the other side, where you decide not to participate in a space you’ve enjoyed for multiple years and decide you’ve had enough, but once you’ve left you’ll never know if anyone’s missed you or not. I did have one person tell me on FB that she wondered where I was, so at least that was something.
Nineteen years of blogging and I can say there was a time when people paid a little more attention or so it seemed to me. It was when blogs ruled supreme and we weren’t slammed with content overload.
I got a few comments and questions then if my pace changed but that was long ago.
Now I almost never hear anything and if I do it is usually someone from ‘real life’ who is concerned about whether things are going on in the background.
We’re all busy and preoccupied with our lives. I think it also depends on what people know about us. Some bloggers wrote about illnesses and sometimes I paid extra attention.
But overall I think people just go about their business.