January 12, 2006

• Topic: A quick blog assessment

  
  

  I struggle oftentimes with deciding what to write on this blog.  I currently don’t have specific goals or purposes for this blog, and I guess I’ll use this post to address that.

  
  

  Writing for myself isn’t my goal…I have personal journals for that.  I’ve also accepted that I’m not writing to a set-audience…in fact, I know close to nothing about my audience.  Depending on the post, I may gain a reader for life, or ensure that someone never re-visits this site. 

  
  

  Recently…I’ve been using xanga to reach people and their ideas.  Slowly building virtual relationships that I’ve learned can be quickly translated into real and tangible friendships.

  
  

  Sometimes, I think this blog is practice for something bigger I hope to achieve.  I’ve managed to persevere at this for 2+ years now, and while my thoughts have developed immensely, I’m still addressing the core issues that I began with.  Primarily, addressing issues related to education, mental health, lifestyle, and society.  By staying true and consistant to those themes, I’ve put together a wealth of writing that people can one day look back on.

  
  

  In time, I hope to have a massive reader base, who come to this site as one of several central places to discuss matters related to the themes I just described.  I hope to reach a point where I can have an idea, and be able to write with the knowledge that parents, children, students, workers, foreigners, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and a whole wide-range of groups will be immediately access my idea and be able to transform it in some way. 

  
  

  For example…I’d love to write on this blog, “This summer…we’re organizing a massive picnic in Central Park to celebrate leisure a good friggin’ time, and as part of a political movement to make our society more leisure centered,” and in an instant I’d have credible people who could give me feedback and work towards organizing such an event.

  
  

  So…I guess I’ll just continue to write whatever I’ve been writing.  For those reading this now, I’m open to feedback on what I might write about, and in what style.  Ultimately…writing is secondary to human contact, and that’s another area I’m using to build community.  I just discovered my book had a brief write-up in the Alternative Education Resource Organization’s magazine, and I’m trying to read as much as possible about current educational issues, and finding the key players.  So…I can only expect things to grow slowly w/ time, and while I may benefit from random events, I hope to find deliberate ways to grow.

  
  

  I’ve been struggling to reconcile my energy for creating something, and my need to control that energy in a way that maintains balance in my life.  I’ve recently grown interested by words…and in my next post, I think I’ll explore the several words such as: “create” ”creative” “image” “imagine” “imaginary.”

  
  

  To give a rought draft of my thoughts, I feel as much of life is imagined through our minds, and we work to imagine, or create meaning, in our lives.  The differences between any two people are how they imagine, or conceive (giving birth to images?), of the world outside of themselves. 

  
  

  For example, my desire to promote more alternative schools…is that similar to an artists’ desire to paint a landscape?  Is political idealism merely a creative expression of how to ”paint” metaphorically speaking, a society?  I’ve also often been drawn to the idea of making a documentary to better communicate or visualize my thoughts to other people.  Perhaps my interest there is to create something as a small piece of painting a bigger canvas of cultural change.

  
  

  Creation, or being creative, is something we all possess as a quality.  It’s the process of organizing our thoughts in unique ways to make other thoughts, decisions, and actions.  People can be creative with words as in joke-telling, actions as in dancing, sound as in music. 

  
  

  These thoughts are bringing me back to a book that caught my attention once about lateral thinking, by Edward de Bono, which was a book about not only how to achieve creative thinking as a practical thinking tool, but how to use those thinking tools to create new ideas to create a better society.  And if you think my writing is sometimes out there, this guy did it first!  He presented tons of ideas, and I think he was able to achieve some by building real-world connections.

  
  

  The Time magazine article on creativity also noted that most people are mystified by people who have developed creative ideas.  What the article notes is that those people, Einstein, the Wright Brothers, Darwin, were people who failed in their thoughts many times before hitting one that worked.  The article also noted that creative thinkers almost always build on their thoughts from others.

  
  

  Create meaning
  Meaning is creative
  Create
  Hmmm….

  
  

  thoughts?
  

  
  

   

  
  

   

  • 5:10 pm
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