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Tag: blogging

Early Wednesday morning I saw the lunar eclipse. On Thursday I reinstituted my meditation practice after a long sabbatical. On Friday evening I attended an inspiring recital by the great pianist Richard Goode, and reconnected with several of my good piano friends. On Saturday, for the first (and possibly last) time, I finished first in my spin class at Flywheel, and happily read the front page headline of the first gay couples in North Carolina to experience legal wedded bliss. These would ordinarily be potential subjects for this week’s post. But this week is special, inasmuch as it’s the 300th edition of the Casual Blog.

Many moons ago, I set myself the goal of writing one post a week on my non-professional activities and thoughts, and that’s pretty much what I’ve done. I’ve been trying to think what to say about this milestone, and it occurred to me to explain why I create the Casual Blog, or what I get out of it. But if I’m honest, which I try to be, I must admit I’m still not completely sure.

I enjoy finishing a post, but starting one always involves a degree of existential dread. Once a week, I ask myself, do I have anything else worth saying/sharing, and I always worry that the answer is no, I’ve run dry. And so it was this week. But I’ve already succeeded in writing three paragraphs!

I generally dislike writing about writing, and now I’ve gone and done it. But onward! There’s some odd part of me that enjoys the exertion of forcing the buzzing blooming flood of experience into the narrow channel of language. Writing about an experience usually shows me something about the experience I hadn’t known before. And there is at times a joy in language that has less to do with the meaning than with pure sound.

Then there’s always the struggle for understanding, for meaning. Things happen. Events flow out of other events, sometimes cohering in an orderly way, with pleasing patterns, and other times cracking and scattering. What does it all mean? Blogging will likely not yield an ultimate answer, but it creates a platform, a workbench for reviewing experience that yields new perspectives.

As with Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, we can’t observe and record our lives without changing them. That is, writing about one’s life changes the life. The imperative to make a post non-boring could lead to inauthenticity, but not necessarily. It could also inspire curiosity and get you out of your shell. The blogging commitment could lead to adventure!

Most important, there’s also the complicated sensation of communicating with another human. For the writer, the reader is ever-present as an as idea and concern, but almost never physically present. Without the reader, the writer would never write, but the connection is always tenuous. Who is the reader? Open or closed? Friend or foe? Can we connect? The writer in the act of writing is never certain.

And whenever we reach out to another human, trying to be honest, showing something about ourselves that’s real, there’s an element of risk. There’s a chance we’ll make total fools of ourselves. This gets the juices going. It’s kind of exciting. Actually, it is exciting!

But it is also difficult. Whatever words are chosen means other words are not chosen. So many possible words, and possible choices, but whatever the choices, however good they are, others just as good will be excluded, sacrified. You know this when you start. But something still causes you to reach out, to explore, to experiment. There are satisfying little discoveries, and sometimes there’s evidence that you got through, made a connection.

So, you ask, what lies ahead for the Casual Blog? I really don’t know. Part of what I like about it is it’s voluntary, unnecessary, and contingent. It doesn’t have to be any particular thing, and could cease at any time. As I said, I’m always aware of the possibility of running dry, and I would stop posting if it stopped being fun. Or if my readers disappeared.

But part of me feels that I’m just getting well started, and I’m still enjoying experimenting and learning. If there were somehow more hours in the day, I could imagine writing a number of more specialized blogs, in addition to my professional writing. It would be fun to tend blogs on scuba diving, playing the piano, travel, global warming, opera, golfing, animal rights, ballet, political corruption, vegetarian restaurants, exercise, neuroscience, nuclear weapons, nature photography, poetry, artificial intelligence, the surveillance state, migratory birds, history, books I’m reading, etc. We shall see.

A monarch in downtown Raleigh, October 8, 2014

2 Comments

July 14, 2013

Flowers, robotic challenges, and a note on this blog

On Saturday morning as I drove up to Raulston Arboretum to look at the blooms and take some pictures, it began to drizzle, and I considered scrubbing the mission. But I decided instead to take my golf umbrella. Working the camera while sheltering it from the rain was awkward, but I got a few images of flowers with raindrops that I liked, which are above and below.

You may have missed, as I almost did, an interesting story this week about the DARPA robotics challenge. DARPA is holding a humanoid robot competition similar to its contest that pushed forward the boundaries for autonomous vehicles. Teams of technologist will compete for a $2 million prize with a robot that will be able to perform rescue functions in difficult conditions and do things like climb into a vehicle, drive it, get out, walk on uneven ground, open doors, operate power tools, and shut off valves. A prototype called Atlas is being provided by the Pentagon to teams of programmers, while other teams are building their own devices.

While the Pentagon is emphasizing the humanitarian possibilities of such a device, it could obviously have less benign military applications. And, as the Times notes, the new robots could also work in department stores. Or, I’d add, just about any place that humans work. As I’ve noted before, the quick advance of such technology is going to cause unemployment and economic dislocation, which we need to be thinking about. Along with these public policy issues, there are existential ones. In the not-too-distant world of brilliant and powerful computers and robots that can do almost any human activity better than humans, what does it mean to be human? What is the point of being human? What is our highest and best use?

I was pleased to see that yesterday The Casual Blog set a new record: 251 views. Most of those views had to do with a post about getting older, Gary Player’s diet and exercise routine, and yoga. I wrote the thing a couple of years ago, and I have no idea why it is suddenly getting attention.

One of my self-imposed rules for The Casual Blog is that I do not actively promote it. Some of my friends have never heard of it. I am fortunate in not needing to make money from it. I don’t need to worry about whether something that seems interesting to me will appeal to anyone else. I’m free, in theory, to say whatever I think, and it matters not if no one reads it.

Except that it does. There is no doubt that I like having readers. This is slightly embarrassing, but I’ll confess: I check my blog stats every day, and feel pleased when the number is above average and less-than-pleased when it’s below. There’s a little frisson of pleasure when someone I know mentions something they read in TCB, and a particular thrill when I meet a new person who has read it. Would I continue to write it if the readership fell to zero? Possibly, but only if I thought some future person would one day read it.

Of course, much (though as noted not all) of my satisfaction in TCB is the self-contained but complex pleasure of writing. Taking the raw material of a particular part of my experience – the things I do for fun in non-working hours – and molding it into something coherent and possibly interesting is an absorbing challenge.

There was an interesting recent essay by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the NY Times defending the humanities as an educational objective, which drew a connection between learning to articulate experience and general life satisfaction. I thought Klinkenborg put it well:

Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you.
No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.

A rare and precious inheritance indeed.

The Casual Blog

Tag: blogging

October 12, 2014

My three-hundredth post

July 14, 2013

Flowers, robotic challenges, and a note on this blog