For many years I’ve had conversations with people and it’s been suggested to “start a blog”, but for years I’ve also struggled with what that could be in terms of structure and focus. After much thought, it seems to be a way of thinking about how we live that covers a pretty wide range of topics. So I decided to just start off and see where it leads.
That’s not to say there isn’t a plan, the plan is to post at least twice a week for the coming year and the content of that year as well as paths it could take from there are already fairly clear. What I realised though is that sometimes you cannot see the end from the beginning.
This isn’t claiming to be highly crafted or academic writing – my style is more conversational. It is grounded in education, the observation of life and a love of language but the aim is more to look at relationships between things and what may lie behind that. Raising questions that we must all answer for ourselves, and letting that affect attitudes or actions as it may. Sometimes it may sound simplistic or idealistic, but it is what it is.
Looking for meaning in life is something that’s often ridiculed, “Not everything has to mean something, you know”. But for me, it does. Whether we’re aware of it or not, whether we look that deeply or not, every action and word and reality has a set of opinions, ideas, attitudes, beliefs, values behind it. Whether we live more consciously aware of these meanings or lead a more unexamined life on that level is, for me, the crux of whether we are able to more intentionally shape the world in which we live, indeed the world we actually seem to create with these accumulated actions.
So, this blog is mainly looking to shed a different light on aspects of how we live (and by “we” I mean Western society with its global ramifications – I’m conscious that I only speak as myself, which is based in the UK and within Western culture in general. When I say “we” or “our” that is the perspective I am writing from and I trust that people from different backgrounds will be able to orientate themselves relative to that). I’m imagining this will take the form of relatively short posts over a number of themes, sometimes taking ideas expressed in books or other media as starting points.
We shall see, I suppose, and regardless of whether this attracts much of a following I deeply believe it’s valuable to ask such questions and think about what we are doing.
November 2016