Stream of Conscience Ramblings...

(About the photograph: I took this picture along the road south of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota last summer. Most of the pictures I use on blog posts are not my own, unless I label the post 'Photography,' in which case the picture is original. All of the pictures I use in the side bar are my own original work.)

Today I'm going to force myself to make a personal post about anything that comes to mind while I'm writing it. Frequent readers of this blog may have noticed that I rarely really 'blog.' Blogging is like journaling, and we've been taught to keep our thoughts to ourselves, to keep our diaries under lock and key...Is it because our thoughts are dangerous, or because they're valuable...? I don't know why.

For me, I guess it's because a blog is on the WORLDWIDE WEB and I can't monitor who reads it or how they interpret it. On the one hand, a blogger wants lots of people to read his/her blog. Why? So that he or she has greater influence in some cosmic sense. On the other hand, bloggers tend to be quiet types. I may want to shout something from the rooftop, but I want to do so without making a noise which might disturb someone. I was raised to be, above all else, a nice girl. I wouldn't want to post anything offensive. It's easier, then, not to post at all - at least nothing that I have to acknowledge is 100% my own thinking. Afterall, someone may disagree with it or be bothered by it.

With this blog (as with anything I create) I want to lift myself and others to higher attitudes, thoughts, and actions - not by preaching, but by setting before us some of what is good or beautiful about life. It isn't all wonderful, no, but the world is full of people who will point out what's wrong with it and what's unfair about it - I don't want to do that. I choose not to add to the negativity of the world as much as I can avoid it. Sometimes I simply can't avoid it and fall in with the complainers, the nay-sayers, and the cynics. I can be as sarcastic as the next person, and more sarcastic than most. It's my debate training, I think. I can see both sides of most every issue.

For everything that's said about the value of a good example (all of it true, I might add), I have certainly learned a lot from the negative examples in my life. You learn consequences either way, if you're observant, unless you insist upon experiencing all of the consequences, good and bad, yourself. I am one of those people who could learn from the mistakes of others without making them all myself, which saved me a lot of time and untold misery.

As a child I used to interview myself all the time (like Oprah, only long before Oprah - probably the Donahue era), pretending to be an Olympic ice skater or a movie star or a widow...those are the three interviews I remember best. This exercise helped me imagine what life would be like in someone else's shoes - what triumphs and regrets they would have experienced, what everyday life for them would be like. Even today Scott is often amazed by my ability to practically 'experience' the hypothetical...I guess I still have a very active imagination.

In recent years I've found myself admiring seemingly negative qualities in other people. For example, I have admired people for their irresponsibility. Why? Because they are not 'burdened' with a sense of duty. They are given more latitude, because no one expects them to be anything other than impulsive. Of course I can see that this characteristic causes them a degree of suffering, too (often a great degree), but who can say whether they suffer more for being irresponsible than I do for being hyper responsible? It takes time and energy to dot all those i's and cross all those t's (but probably not as much time and energy as it would to undot them and uncross them and start over...) I would not choose to be irresponsible even if I could, and I'm not sure that I can. It's just interesting to note that, as with everything else in life, irresponsibility has its pluses as well as its minuses.