So where am I coming from?
I've been writing a journal for a year now. It began as a necessary means to organize my mind as my inner life was rapidly changing. Perhaps it was my first life crisis, or a sort of an awekening to the reality. Long story short, certain meetings and events started to increasingly alter my way of seeing life and I myself began to take new form.
So I wrote. Like a stream of consciousness flooding down onto the paper, I was trying to make sense of what was happening to me. And as I kept writing, I kept changing.
I have now discovered that is what Albert Einstein called 'education' - not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.
Why blog? The world today is more connected than ever before, I think we can all fairly easily agree to that. Yet we go on leading very isolated lives. Sure we're all buzzing in the social media, but no matter how many links we post or photos we put up, how many of us are actually sharing our thoughts? Could it be that many of us don't really even know how (or better yet, who) we are? Has our inner voice stopped speaking to us?
Let's look at this from another angle. Privacy is a right, is it not? Are we not told by every possible channel that we have the right to protect our lives? To live in our own little boxes and make our own little money, but crash and burn on our own if we fail. We have the right to have our own sexual orientations, spiritual views and political stand - and to keep all that strongly to ourselves.
Why should we need to keep our true thoughts to ourselves and only speak on the surface of things? To protect our "public image"? I have learnt that nothing moves in an environment where everyone is trying to fill everyone else's expectations of themselves. Environments including Facebook.
We could call that disconnection, unengagement, and alienation. From ourselves and from the world. Imagine a scenario where mental strain, or financial difficulties, or lack of motivation is starting to affect your well-being. Since this society is built to adore personal success, your personal struggle is a very undesirable matter to bring up. So we again keep things to ourselves.
Perhaps individualism increases isolation. Perhaps isolation creates anxiety and depression. Perhaps depression makes our minds numb. Perhaps numbness disconnects us from ourselves and the world which we live in. What if we end up becoming just miserable mirror images of each other, trying to keep calm and carry on? A world of individuals who have stopped speaking, stopped caring, stopped believing and stopped taking any kind of true responsibility of our actions.
What do you think?
The contemplative Sr Marie De La Trinite wrote "I must put what I know into practice, and before all else make sure that love and humility are at the centre of my soul."
With love,
Henna
