fragile thoughts
Yesterday I blogged about Morgan's words on fragile thoughts, explosive ideas, and reading. These ideas keep rolling around in my mind as I try to clarify and study them from all sides, all perspectives.
This is my year of "provocation and privacy." This is my year to make some sense of it all. In this quest, I find myself thinking constantly, rolling around those fragile thoughts. I think about identity, of faith, of how we define ourselves, of work, of love. I think about acceptance, and social validation of self. I think about how my stress and health affects my family.
I think about the world, of justice and tragedy. I think about the politicians, the media who preach a doctrine based on lies, hate and fear. I wonder, truly perplexed, about the people who believe it, who seem to need to believe it.
I wonder if living deliberately is even possible. I wonder if it can only lead to unhappiness, to internal dischord. I wonder why I need it so. I go to bed at night exhausted, not from doing but from thinking. From delicately trying to separate the wires of explosive thoughts, faith from reason, fact from opinion, need from want, past from present from future.
In my youth, I read the works of Hesse, of Colin Wilson, of Ed Abbey and Fitzgerald and Pirsig. I found validation through the examination of the Outsider; I found peace in thinking about thinking, and in being deliberate about constructing myself. I was comfortable walking my own path to higher education, to love, to travel and to belief. I was thoughtful in the moves I made.
I recognized in myself the ability to study others, and to detach and "play the game." I delighted at my victories, my strategies for winning, strengthened by the fact that I kept my proverbial dogs out of the fight. It was the game I enjoyed more than the outcome. I knew I walked a slippery slope, and that the risk was becoming invested, losing perspective. And somehow it happened.
The paradox that I couldn't see, my own Catch-22, was that playing the game gets old if you don't care about it. If I didn't care, it wasn't worth doing and yet if I did care, then I was no longer the Outsider. I let myself become a part of a system I don't really believe in. Worse, I invested in a system I don't really believe in. I took the bad because I loved the good, compromising more and more.
Thoreau famously wrote, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately." This is my chance to stop and model that belief. I want to live my life with thoughtful purpose, not just in my writing and how I vote, in how I raise my children but in how I spend my time and in the work I do.
I want to live deliberately.
This is my year of "provocation and privacy." This is my year to make some sense of it all. In this quest, I find myself thinking constantly, rolling around those fragile thoughts. I think about identity, of faith, of how we define ourselves, of work, of love. I think about acceptance, and social validation of self. I think about how my stress and health affects my family.
I think about the world, of justice and tragedy. I think about the politicians, the media who preach a doctrine based on lies, hate and fear. I wonder, truly perplexed, about the people who believe it, who seem to need to believe it.
I wonder if living deliberately is even possible. I wonder if it can only lead to unhappiness, to internal dischord. I wonder why I need it so. I go to bed at night exhausted, not from doing but from thinking. From delicately trying to separate the wires of explosive thoughts, faith from reason, fact from opinion, need from want, past from present from future.
In my youth, I read the works of Hesse, of Colin Wilson, of Ed Abbey and Fitzgerald and Pirsig. I found validation through the examination of the Outsider; I found peace in thinking about thinking, and in being deliberate about constructing myself. I was comfortable walking my own path to higher education, to love, to travel and to belief. I was thoughtful in the moves I made.
I recognized in myself the ability to study others, and to detach and "play the game." I delighted at my victories, my strategies for winning, strengthened by the fact that I kept my proverbial dogs out of the fight. It was the game I enjoyed more than the outcome. I knew I walked a slippery slope, and that the risk was becoming invested, losing perspective. And somehow it happened.
The paradox that I couldn't see, my own Catch-22, was that playing the game gets old if you don't care about it. If I didn't care, it wasn't worth doing and yet if I did care, then I was no longer the Outsider. I let myself become a part of a system I don't really believe in. Worse, I invested in a system I don't really believe in. I took the bad because I loved the good, compromising more and more.
Thoreau famously wrote, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately." This is my chance to stop and model that belief. I want to live my life with thoughtful purpose, not just in my writing and how I vote, in how I raise my children but in how I spend my time and in the work I do.
I want to live deliberately.
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