Good Traveler
A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler is one who does not know where he came from. - Lin Yu-t'angI've been thinking about changing the name of my blog to something that seems less like I am looking back over a long and full life and more like I am in the middle of the messy journey. In a way I think it is stupid to change it, like what difference does it make? But I am restless.
I have never felt like I fit my name. Like my family, it has always seemed like something I couldn't quite recognize or relate to. It was like I had been kidnapped as an infant and couldn't identify with my family or my name - or the town where I grew up or the people in it.
I'm wandering the earth looking for people from my tribe, I guess. And now that I have entered the blogosphere, I see others doing the same. I think. But is anything here as it seems? What a strange place, where people have relationships with people they have never met. I care more about some of the people I have connected with in the blogosphere than people I see face-to-face every day.
Once again I try to analyze this process of blogging. I can sense I have entered a new phase with it. I'm wondering, what do all of us who are anonymously putting ourselves out there have in common? What do we want? Is this a substitute for relationships? Are the relationships formed here just as real as any other? Do we need to know another person physically to truly experience them? This has got to be a burgeoning new field for psychological research.
It feels like I am being tricked with smoke and mirrors, and enjoying it.
posted by MJ @ 5:30 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
When I meet or talk to people in real life I rarely find out anything about them. In the past few years I dealt with over 1,000 clients on a regular basis most of whom I cannot tell you anything about except their business needs. Occasionally this trance is broken. I recently talked to a woman at large women's apparel company I deal with and who I have been trying get to complete a request for me. She told me she was sorry that she couldn't do it right now because her divorce was being finalized on Friday and she was crushed and just couldn't think. I said I was sorry and she could call me when she could. I also recently got a call from a man from at an electronics company who I had never heard from. I asked where my normal contact was and he said she was in the hospital with brain cancer. People who have no personal characteristics suddenly become flush with color. It seems to me that the blog world is interesting because I start with only personal characteristics and the rest is filled in as I go along. It is the opposite of the rest of my life. Weird.
Here, as anonymous souls we are free from those prejudices that accompany first impressions. So in a way, maybe we can see one another more clearly.
This is all somehow related to your blog of 2/7, Gene. You said, "When I was a kid I had neighbors who made squirrel stew and grew all their own vegetables. I had neighbors who wrote plays. I had neighbors who smoked pot everyday and could barely hold down a job. I had neighbors who came here from Germany and never took a day off from work and never took a vacation. They did not always get along, but their stories were all unique. They were a narrative with substance." What a rich visual memory.
When I look around my world I see a homogenous culture. But in the blogosphere there seems to be a diversity that is both old fashioned in its acceptance of difference (allowing it to exist, maybe not liking it, but living beside it) and futuristic in its lack of physicality. Maybe as difference becomes harder to discern in the physical world, non physical relationships will become preferable.
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