My first blog was entitled Musings from Myopia. The second one was Brittle Road. The third, It Matters Deeply. Those three, plus this one, are the only ones with any significant substance. A few others, each only one or two or three posts long, have disappeared into the ether of my memories. They still may exist, but I have no reason to search for them. And then there is this one, the eponymous compilation of thoughts and emotions and ideas and contemplations I hoped might be worth recording for posterity. Maybe this one is simply a monument to my ego.
Despite multiple attempts to carve out or otherwise stake a claim to an intellectual legacy, the outcomes thus far have been inconsistent and incomplete. But that may be the most lasting lesson of my efforts—that consistency and completion cannot be achieved in the universe in which we live. Our world and everything in it is in a constant state of flux. None of us are consistently reliable. We steadfastly deviate from certainty. And the very idea that we really finish anything is laughable. We don’t even truly begin. Whether we know it or not, our efforts are just continuations of ideas of others; others about whom we may know little or nothing. Our knowledge is built in layers, like the petrified sediments of a million-year-old river bed. Each successive layer requires the ones that came before it to serve as its base. There may be an original layer, somewhere deep beneath the ones above, but probably it is thin and weak. And it may have merged with the ones above it, hiding its crucial role as the place where something started.
Digging deep into our own psyches, we can mine more riches than if we were to dig in a pit of diamonds. Looking within, we are capable of creating knowledge that simply cannot exist in a cursory universe. While we do not begin and we do not finish, we always serve as critical links between past and present and future. But only for ourselves. Only for that secret person hidden beneath the façades we show the world. For me, this blog is the tool I use to explore a mine; to find out where I have been, where I am, and where I might be going. This may sound mystical and mysterious, but it is far from it. Examining every facet of our lives allows us to know ourselves more thoroughly, though not completely. I think most people, though, either are afraid of searching beneath the surface layers. Or they do not realize the substrata reflect our selves far more realistically than does the surface.
I have more to say about this. But not just now. Now, I have other obligations that take my fingers from the keys.
