Honesty and blogging
I am sick and tired of stories. I spend so much of my life wrapped up in mental fantasies about the world around me, instead of actually seeing it with open eyes and an open mind.
For instance, this morning I was thinking about my company KeywordSmart. I’m discussing with my team a potential shift in strategy that I’m excited about. Next thing I know I’m fantasizing about it taking off, about being a web millionaire and famous and hanging out with all the silicon valley elite. What bullshit! Sure, maybe this thing will take off and maybe it’ll be great. But if it does it’ll look nothing like my imagination, and the surest way to get there is to not spend time imagining it.
(They did a study, actually: positive fantasies, whether career-related, love-related, or otherwise, are negatively correlated with success. However, positive fantasies immediately followed by splashing the cold water of reality on them are positively correlated with success. Don’t want to bother looking up the citation.)
I’ve been much more personal in two of my last three posts on this blog than I’ve been in the past. I don’t like it, I don’t want it, I want to keep my nasty little thoughts and insecurities and pains to myself. But I’m doing it anyway because the only way to be real is to be real: the only way to live life as it is, experience things as they are, rather than to live wrapped up in thought bubble cocoons, is to be totally honest and accepting of how life is, and for me, I guess, that means writing about it.
Various meditative traditions teach how to hear your thoughts as thoughts, as emissions of your chattering mind, rather than taking them seriously as a description of reality. When I meditate, I can temporarily stop the part of myself that assigns labels and categories and values to everything I see, and instead actually take in raw sensory exeperience: the reflection of my shirt in the monitor in front of me, right now, for instance.
I think there’s a lot to those meditative traditions, but for me I need more than passively learning to let my mind chatter. I need active meditation: taking the garbage extruded by my brain and fashioning it into actions, risky scary actions that break the silly little fake reality my mind tries to build around me every time I turn my back.
So every single day, I’m going to try to write a blog post. I’m afraid they’ll suck. I’m afraid I won’t have anything to say. Worse, I’m afraid I’ll say thing I don’t want to say. But them’s the breaks. And, I’m in good company… there are other people out there taking this approach to writing too.
Now, I’ll be honest again. I have no idea how to end this thought. So, I guess I’ll just let it stop. Now.