It has reached a point at which I am that peculiar balance of caffeinated and exhausted which causes me to feel inspired in wanting to write something down. This has happened in the past months, but I have talked myself out of it. It is strangely narcissistic on two fronts to do this. On the one hand, I question the importance of my thoughts being framed for others to see - isn't that hubris? On the other, this self-deprecation does no one any good, when my conscience chides me that I really fear mediocrity. That my thoughts are not so profound or worth sharing. (Which may be the case.) Or that I shall not do a good job of communicating to others as to why my interests are interesting to me.
But really, in the end, even if no one reads me but me? I shouldn't mind so much. But I write with an audience in mind. I do better when I am trying to explain something and tailor it to that particular person's feedback. In this way, I gain a better feeling for whether my interest really is interesting and whether it is able to be shared. Because, ultimately, these interests I come across give me such joy and delight that I want to share this feeling with others so that their lives become similarly improved.
Long introduction aside, I shall try to engage in this blog more often. I have said this in the past, and each reason I have stopped is because I hit a proverbial wall in things to talk about. I tend to front load my priorities of things I find interesting, then get tired of writing when I reach less interesting things. Each time, it has gotten to a point where my time would be usually spent experiencing interesting things worth writing about has been replaced by me trying to write about them instead.
Quite simply, I exhaust my content of interesting things and decide it is better to return to the pursuit of seeking out things that interest me, figuring it is better for all involved. If I write something, I wish it was worth the reading.
But this is but an introduction and an explanation as to my absences in the past. As I have tried to do more or less successfully in the past each time. And each time, I learn a little bit more about myself and how I process information. I can be quite self-obsessed, but am not always self-impressed.
Thank you so far for your patience.
To return to the concept of my thinking better out loud to other people, I am rereading Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency." There is a character named Way who is the Steve Jobs of the fictitious WayForward technology brand. One of his peculiar habits is of calling his employees and leaving long messages on their home answering machines. In these messages, it often happens that he hashes out the details of ideas he has for products and services to be offered by his company. So it is the job of his secretary to go around to the houses of people that he might have called to retrieve and transcribe the messages he leaves, so that he can reread them in his office each week. The reason that is given as to why he didn't make the process easier and just use a voice recorder on a cassette tape, is that he probably didn't like to listen to himself. And since he was rich enough to pay someone else to deal with his eccentricity, the behavior was humored for the most part by family and employees.
While the above novel is ridiculous and absurd, I have an affinity and empathy for this character which Adams created. I tend to love the author's work precisely because of such things. I delight in being delighted and surprised by cleverness, and Adams' work is extremely self-impressed by its cleverness. But if it is ever pretentious, it acknowledges the behavior as a particular defect and accepts the joke on itself with a smile.
Similar feelings and affinities abound when I read G.K. Chesterton. Both authors are deliciously eloquent and I aspire to their turns of phrase and joy at looking at the world with fondness. They each remark on the everyday oddities that all too often we learn to take for granted as natural parts of life. They ask the question as to "Why we give such things a free ride? What if an element of the practice were tweaked to be exaggerated to grotesque magnitude or minimized to the simplest iteration without any edifices?" It takes a certain deftness to perform such delicate surgery on perspectives of an audiences' minds and allow them to see the world anew with greater clarity and awe.
But these are the authors who speak to me and my understanding. There are other writers and speakers who are able to convey the same message, tailored to a different audience with different relative positions and connections to correlate ways of understanding ideas and information.
I hope you find them. That these people who share your enthusiasms, interests, and mindset structure are located and that you are able to learn from and be challenged by them.
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