Took this pic at work of the Air with Michael Caputo’s six-color sticker affixed. Looks great.
Phenomenology
More on the Why of Blogging
I’ve contributed my fair share of posts about why (bother) blogging at all, and while I resist the solipsistic urge to overly consider myself, I am serially drawn to make some sense of it. Here are some recent posts to consider.
David Johnson:
That is me and blogging. I enjoy writing. It moves me, flexes a creative urge within me, one that I cannot leave alone or ignore – a wish to explain, describe, explore through the written word. I enjoy it for its own sake, for my sake. I am very happy if someone loves what I write or share, and I will keep writing even if the next piece is not seen.
For the Love of Writing…of Blogging
Sylvia:
Then one morning, I wrote something in my journal, I think, or for a blog post that has stuck with me ever since: I blog for an audience of one: me.
This realisation keeps me writing, keeps me sharing what I write.
Sebastian:
My latest blogging adventure has been going on since 2024 and I am still looking for my blogging style. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I treat it as my path. A path that leads through my thoughts, which sometimes follow a straight path and sometimes bumpy roads. However, regardless of whether I feel like writing down a one-sentence thought or a multi-paragraph reflection, I am guided by something that Leslie Lampart beautifully put into words: “If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking”. So I’m writing because I’m thinking.
I’m writing because I’m thinking
Joan Didion:
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
There’s probably no one irreducible reason why; for me, it’s thinking, it’s a creative urge, it’s purpose without material value, it’s work without economic propulsion, it’s maybe even a phenomenological _sine qua non._Maybe a Buddhist attachment, in a negative sense: attachment to identity or narrative, a desire for permanence . It’s the text equivalent of my photos collection, the left-brain accounting of my wanderings on this pebble. I can’t apologize for scrolling through either my photos or my posts for a myriad of reasons.
Do we hope to capture these moments… these ephemera… to avoid forgetting them? In the hopes that we’ll see them again one day and remember them fondly? To think that we are, somehow, casting the shadow of our mortality just a bit longer than its natural demarcation?
Yes. Yes we do.
More Silent Treatment
It brings me no joy to write that my link post to What You’re Saying When You Give Someone the Silent Treatment remains perennially popular here. Here’s Arthur Brooks from his email newsletter on the same topic:
As a reaction to disagreement, the “silent treatment” is about the worst choice possible for everyone.
People who ruminate on a conflict with their partner—turning it over and over in their mind—are especially prone to punitive actions, including the silent treatment. Try not to get stuck perseverating on the dispute, and use your words instead.
Thoughts: Comme Ci, Comme Ça
axxuy:
It’s easy to notice how easily ideas slip away from our minds. But this is a distraction: when you focus on this you do not see that the same ideas slipped in just as easily. And they’ll keep doing that.
Ideas are cheap. Catch them if you can, but it’s not really worth worrying about them much.
This is an inside-out observation consonant with mindfulness: Thoughts-good and bad-are temporary appearances in our consciousness. (Non-dualists would add that we don’t “think” them from a central self or cognitive operator.)
While it can be frustrating to forget “good” ideas, it is inversely helpful that we are able to forget “bad” thoughts, too. Thoughts come, and thoughts go. You don’t have to identify with them.
“Leisure”
I’ve wondered and pondered existentially here on more than one occasion. What is the role in our lives of pursuits outside of work? What is their priority? What does “work-life balance” even mean?
And then, in the Atlantic, Arthur Brooks writes:
Doing leisure well will generate the sort of growth in our well-being that work cannot provide. We need to take the time to dwell on life’s big questions without distraction, to learn to appreciate what is beautiful, to transcend our workaday lives and consider what is divine.
Leisure, in other words, is far from the modern notion of just chillin’. It is a serious business, and if you don’t do leisure well, you will never find life’s full meaning. Properly understood, leisure is the work you do for yourself as a person without an economic compulsion driving you. For Pieper, this work of leisure—no contradiction, in his view—would not involve such “acediac” activities as scrolling social media and chuckling at memes, getting drunk, or binge-streaming some show. Rather, true leisure would involve philosophical reflection, deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills, spending time in nature, or deepening personal relationships.
In this conception, leisure done correctly is equally important, and a source of generation, rather than a solipsistic, selfish pursuit.