He had been sitting in a hospital waiting room beside his wife for what would be her last chemotherapy treatment, he read to us. The TV had been on on as always. Nuns who volunteered at the hospital moved through the room handing out cookies, coffee and comfort.
Everything was normal, as normal as things can be when you know your life long partner has a terminal illness. Then the news announcer broke into scheduled programming. A plane had slammed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.
The nun with the oatmeal cookies, dropped her plate. "Oh, my God!" Her words reverberated in the stillness of the room. It wasn’t the news that shocked him as much as the way the nun spoke them. "They weren't a prayer," he told us when he finished reading. "I'd never heard a sister talk that way."
As participants in the bereavement support group last week continued sharing what they had been doing when they first heard about the terrorist attacks, I was struck by the power of detail – how things that seem inconsequential on the surface telegraph a deeper meaning when they’re written down on paper.
The splashes of rain pelting the dusty windshield when the news came over the car radio crackling with static and a crumpled old newspaper blowing across the street at just that instant. The smell of bacon frying in the kitchen. A cat pushing its weight against a leg and purring. The blanket and sheet tangled at the foot of the bed.
Our lives are comprised of such details, one coming after the other so fast that they blend together and disappear beneath the surface of consciousness until we pick up a pen and create some stillness in which to write. From that silence they emerge, evoking feelings and understanding far greater than we knew we possessed.
As I listened to people reading their stories last Monday evening, I thought about how writing can be a blessing and a way for us to find order and meaning in the press and crush of living and dying that surrounds us. By quieting ourselves, by honoring the smallest scraps of memory, the telling details, we are able to transcend the confusion.
Too often as writers, we censor these telling details from our journals, our stories, our poems and our essays, before they even make it to the paper. We judge them as an insignificant jumble and shove them aside in favor of what is more obviously meaningful. Who cares if an elderly nun drops a tray of cookies in a waiting room? We want to write about the "real" issues, the "important" ones – the fear, the longing, the loathing, the triumph.
Perhaps the minor details of our lives are the deep language these important issues use to communicate with us, a language that flows naturally and fluently from our pens when we open ourselves to it. Maybe we don’t have to go searching for symbols and meaning after the fact. Each moment of our lives and our memories of those lives are imbedded with these codes. The transparency of a young child’s fingernails. An unexpected cool breeze wafting out of Nowhere on a hot and muggy day. The last egg in the gray cardboard carton. The ravens' raucous cawing as I write this.
When we attend to the details – when we allow ourselves a few moments of quietude in which to record them with awe and tenderness as though we were seeing and hearing and touching and tasting and smelling them for the first time – something deep inside us stirs. We know a truth we didn’t know before. And so do our readers.
Allow yourself some stillness. As you sit down to write, slow your pen on the page. Feel the shape and the weight of the pen in your hand and feel your hand as it moves across the paper. Slow your hand and let it draw out the details from your memory. As you write about a significant event in your life, shift your focus to one of these details, perhaps something that you’d judged as insignificant before. Write about it as if it were the most important thing. Honor it. Listen to it. What does the detail have to tell you?