this past week, i was able to see a production of great expectations… not once, but twice.  in perhaps his greatest classic, dickens constructs a very intriguing female character: his jilted, bitter, miss havisham.  left alone, hopes dashed, life shattered, she responds by stopping all of the clocks at the precise moment things proved painful.  she remained in her dress; she observed a rotting cake; she banished herself to a cold house with an even colder heart.  lonely, she grew old in a house without time.

as a watched this wrinkled representation of a woman, i realized something.  i’m guilty of the same thing.  i have my own ways of pausing clocks and refusing to face hard truths.

i stop writing.

this might come as a complete surprise to people who know me well.  who know that my journal is where my brain plays, releases, and organizes my mindstuff– where i attempt to make sense of my life and thoughts about it.  i record.  i remember.  almost everything.

i haven’t written since august.

oh, i’ve jotted down an idea here and there.  and i’ve taken notes on sermons on sundays and some chapels.  but my thoughts?  what’s happened in my life?  the ups and downs?

not a word.

pages left blank.

dates mysteriously missing.

writing is a very concrete thing.  it’s a way of claiming.  it makes whatever happened, whatever was thought, whatever was said more real.  ink forces both pleasant and unpleasant things permanence on paper.  it forces you to not only remember once to write, but enables you to keep on remembering whatever it is that you have written.

let’s be honest: sometimes, you wish things weren’t real.

sometimes, you wish you didn’t have to remember.

unfortunately for miss havisham, time didn’t stop just because a clock refrained from ticking.  and life still goes on for us, even if we refuse to admit it or want it to.  even if we wish to erase memories; change our minds; reconstruct our worlds.

life has a way of taking words away.

but sometimes, you just have to insist– ready or not– to find them.  speak them… write them anyway.

i understand miss havisham.  she marked the moment her world changed drastically in a drastic way.  she wanted, in a weird way, to have her life stuck, even if tortured.  over time, this defining moment of pain, shock, unmet expectations somehow became a bittersweet friend.  see, fear comes by letting these life-changing moments go.  more pains will be brought, more shocks will emerge, more expectations will be unmet…

sometimes it’s just easier to keep the hurts you have instead of learning to deal with new ones.

refusing to move on, however, changes nothing of the bad.  no matter how you strive to keep yourself from further injury (stopping clocks; refusing to write), it cannot and will not be avoided.  and in the meantime, you hurt yourself.

who knows how miss havisham’s life could have played out differently.  she might have had another shot at love–and actually worn the shoes; actually eaten the cake.  she would have raised an estella with a “natural” heart instead of an ice replica.  in an attempt to prevent further injury, she robbed herself–and all around her– of joy.

i can think of more than one moment in the past few months where my personal clocks have stopped, unexpected events shattering my great expectations.  (more characters than pip in dicken’s tale had hopes and dreams.  they all did.  we all do…) and my way of protection, my way of time freezing–my refusal to write– has paused me.  has kept me from sealing hurt… moving on.

it’s time for clocks to be wound again.

so, here it is: a new writing debut.  a restart.  an attempt to release bittersweet pains in order to be open to more of everything life likes to bring.

i’m sure there will be more hopes deferred along the way, more dreams apparently dashed; but by moving on, i just might find myself surprised by joy along the way, too.

“bruised and broken, but hopefully in a better shape,” i lift my pen.

i find my words.

and write my way to new, hopefully improved, expectations.