January 22, 2007

• Although I have been tossing random words into the blogosphere for years (I was writing in “another place” before I got here….), I seem to spend less time doing so than I used to. As a result, I also find that I spend even less time just “randomly surfing” sites, to find interesting new people whose words touch me.

  There’s something basically important, there… relating to how we “connect” with the world.

  Of course, it occurs to me that it’s probably the height of inane dweebishness to blawg about blawg-ing. At least I’ve been told such things are only for complete uncool losers. At some point in my existence, such opinions would have had a significant impact on my actions, but at some point I moved beyond letting others (and myself) “should on” me. Besides– as I said– the caffeine hasn’t kicked in yet.

  I take some solace in the fact that this isn’t just “blogging about blogging,” but also a bit of an exploration of Why We Do What We Do.

  Now that’s an interesting point. There’s a huge school of thought that subscribes to the notion that when we have our lives “together,” or “in order,” our need to have ourselves (for lack of a better word) “stimulated” by virtual space decreases. On some superficial level, I understand the underlying theory– if we are “engaged” in life (by whatever definition), we have less need and time for “this.” But on a deeper level, it also strikes me as a not so well-thought-through opinion, perhaps cooked up by the mental health profession in a (valid, no doubt) attempt to persuade avoidants and recluses to get outside their front door. My point here– where does “a life” begin and end? It’s tricky. Very few people are going to tell me to “get a life” if I like to read books, but they might tell me to “get a life” if I read an equivalent number of pages online. See the problem? There seems to be a subtext implication that the more mundane our lives are, the more of “a life” we have.

  But I have wandered off-topic, here. As I sit, waiting for the caffeine to kick in– I have been contemplating what exactly makes someone’s site “readable.” And I mean that, in the sense of my likelihood to:

  (A) Read their words, rather than just clicking directly out of there.
  (B) Read their words, and actually leave a comment.
  (C) Read several entries, and leave comments, and perhaps subscribing on the spot.
  (D) You know who you are….

  There’s a saying that “Writers Write.” As a writer, I understand the truth in that, but I also understand the secondary truth that are often voracious consumers of information. It’s a rare day when “a concept” merely plops into my mind, and turns into something I write about. 90% of the time, when I sit down at the keyboard, it’s an idea from somewhere else that jump started me.

  Now….

  “Seekers” (of which I consider myself one) are always in the business of learning. There are a bajillion interpretations of what “Seeking” is about, but the subtext almost always is “learning.” We’re learning, and much of that learning revolves around the activity of trying to put our experience “in context,” be our journeys spiritual, emotional, intellectual, philosophical, or whatever. Humans are ultimately “flock animals” and regardless of whether we see ourselves as “hermits” or “partyers,” we’re pretty solidly locked in the paradigm of viewing our experiences vis-a-vis an external frame of reference.

  There are those who argue that Seekers are profoundly self-absorbed, but I have always found it rather interesting how the alleged “self-absorbtion” is almost always occurring through this external frame of reference. At most, we are “self-absorbedly” trying to frame our life through the experiences of others. Hmmmm….

  But I digress.

  Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

  In a sense, that is at the core of how I decide whether or not someone else’s words are interesting enough to read. Keeping in mind– of course– that this is a matter of personal preference, to read 437th version of what somebody’s kids did for their class project is not what I am here for. Nor is the adult version of “What I Did For My Summer Vacation.” I want to know what’s going on inside a person; what it is that motives them, gives them joy, and anguish, and fear. I want to know that they have “awareness” of themselves, and awareness of the interactive workings between themselves, and the surrounding world. I am not here to partake in some kind of “popularity contest,” including the whole “reciprocal propping” thing. Although the parallel of High School is often thrown around in the context of the blogosphere, at the schools I belonged to you never got an A+ for just “showing up,” you got it for handing in “brilliant work.”

  Of course, few people express themselves in an endless stream of brilliant insight. But there’s part of my bottom line… I am a Seeker, and I look for “insight,” rather than “paint-by-numbers.”

  Hmmmm….

  I am not sure exactly where I have landed with this. Maybe I should just pause, and continue this next time.

   

  • 11:17 am
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