Purpose

Why is this so hard?

It seems I’ve got out of the habit of communicating.  Oh sure, I talk to people, though maybe not as much as I’d like to.  Most days it’s just routine stuff – I’m hardly conscious of it.  Someone says something, my mouth opens and words come out, but it’s little more than a basic stimulus-response reaction.  What they say triggers a memory of a related experience, or a repeated opinion; or sometimes the flip-side - sometimes it triggers a learned what-not-to-say.  But all of it could almost be programmed – standard patterns, forever repeating.  I’m not sure I’m even present whilst it goes on.

Even my thoughts, such as they are, follow familiar pathways.  Nothing new, nothing original, nothing controversial – just the same old circles, worn into a comfortable track.  

Maybe it’s the path of least resistance.  Or maybe it has to do with purpose, or lack thereof.  Not enough reason to stir these torpid grey cells out of their stupor.

That’s actually a bit scary.  If all I ever do is to give an autonomic response to stimuli, then take away the stimuli and I become a vegetable.

This, you see, is why I said I wasn’t ready.  With nothing else to write about, I figured I’d try writing about why I have nothing to write about.  And end up going round these well-worn circles.  It was largely because I had nothing new to say that I drifted away from my old blog.  (I had to correct that last sentence; I originally typed the old blog – unconsciously disowning it in the very words with which I describe it).

Clearly I must have thought something had changed – else why would I have gone to all the trouble of creating a new blog?  

The act of creation was part of the reason – simple though the design may be, it was fun playing with the new Blogger template design tool.  But that can only be a means to an end, not an end in itself.  

Take a look down the sidebar.  The blogroll is still there, with those friends I read for who they are, not for what they write about.  (I confess though that I don’t visit their blogs so often these days.  I got into bad habits of reading in Google Reader, but that can be too impersonal, putting one at arm’s length from the writer).  But above that are some other links – mostly also to blogs, but this time themed.  Music, photography, hills and mountains, and what I’ve called worldview.  The first three of these have been my primary loves ever since childhood; I figured that if I’ve stuck with these for so long, they must mean something to me, and that must be a source of inspiration for writing, mustn’t it?

Ah, yes.  That was what prompted me to start blogging again.  Took a while to remember, but I got there eventually.