It’s been three years or so since I’ve posted, so I guess I’m really not that big on sharing here. I’ve been wondering about this ability, this desire, this expectation to share in social media lately.
I started this blog several years ago as a way to document things in an egotistically attempt to entomb my personal space-time for my progeny. But my progeny will not have or take their time to fool with all of this; they will be interested and involved in their own immediacy.
Which brings me to this need to share here.
I used to think it was selfish to impose my ideas into a forum that may be preserved into the future, and now I wonder if it is now selfish to refuse to impose my digital life into the digital world.
Is it selfish for me to simply sit here and feel the wind and watch these birds and listen to the insects and simply soak in the broader same with my individual senses and somehow hope that others are doing a similar thing in their worlds?
Could the sharing of our experience be created by inhaling and remembering this world through our perceptions instead of eternally expelling it into electronica?
Instead of spending hours flipping and flipping and flipping through the flat colors and noise of temporary handheld entertainment could we instead simply share the wholeness of our lives through every glance we give the pupils of others- be they our loved ones or strangers? Would it be too honest and too vulnerable to expose our souls into the eyes of each other as we meet along our paths instead of looking down into our private worlds of blackened glass?
Well, absolutely! That’s why I will post these words here instead of turning off this phone, getting up out of this chair, and doing the things that make me sweat.
It’s interesting to see the things we share online though. I really like to know what’s going on with my friends and relatives and even strangers. Do all these things matter to me? Or does it matter to folks that I soak up their online worlds and appreciate them the way I would like them to appreciate me?
I think I’ve already spent too much time on this and I need to go cut some firewood for the winter, although the winter is getting warmer and the need for wood is lessened.
Sigh. I think the thing that makes me ponder this so heavily is the fact that the school where I have been teaching for over 20 years is celebrating a very fine young man as he enters his new life in professional basketball (and I celebrate him too and I’m proud of him for that), and yet I have not seen a similar extent of celebration for the young woman who just completed an advanced degree at an ivy league university, or of those who have become physicians, engineers, nurses, mechanics, laborers, musicians, artists, teachers…
And then I think that maybe it is up to me to celebrate them, and that I am just too lazy to do so.
And that is the truth of the sloth that I see within the soul of my own eyes as I stare into my selves within the mirror.
Laziness.
But enough of this.
It is time to cut the wood, and to sweat.
