Heavy Thinking for a Chilly Monday

Vanx wrote a post about blogging and why we feel compelled to do it. Before you go any further with me, go on over to Vanx’s and read what he said. He got me thinking (as he usually does) and here's my take on this, for what it's worth...

I think Vanx is pretty close to the mark about loneliness being a major motivating factor for blogging, but I don't think it's the "gee, there's no one around and I'm bored" kind of loneliness we're talking about here; I think it's more of an existential kind of isolation- a feeling that, even with masses of humanity teeming around us, we're still dangerously alone.

I've been musing (and writing on my own blogs) about empathy for quite some time now: about how we don't have enough of it, about how we don't seem to value it as a human trait, about how we don't foster it enough in ourselves, about how we don't teach our children to practice it. The need to reach out to others - to make ourselves heard and to listen as others respond to what we say - is, I think, as strong a need as breathing in and out. The web offers us another opportunity to do this, and some of us are taking it up as a means of extending our proverbial village.

I've done a small bit of serious thinking about why I blog - the topic comes up now and then as my husband expresses his discomfort with the idea that I share snapshots of my life with any number of random strangers - and it’s in those times of reflection that I try to get at the heart of why *I* feel compelled to put fingers to keys and reveal bits of myself to the world.

For me, the desire to blog is manifold. Part of it, certainly, is the desire for attention. It’s gratifying to know that others are reading what I write and participating, in some small way, in my experience of the world. I also write, particularly in my “work” blog, to gain the insight and ideas of others. If I know nothing else, I know that my own experience is insufficient to get me satisfactorily through this existence - I just can’t learn enough on my own. I am meta enough to know that I often can’t see beyond my own little life, and getting the input of other people - hearing what they think, understanding their opinions or experiences, working through my own thinking as I defend against a contrary view - makes me a better, smarter, more complete human (and, I’m certain of it, a better teacher). Through the people who come to my sites and comment on my entries, I get to stretch my thinking in ways that I would otherwise never have considered. This is the main reason I blog.

When I go back to Vanx’s musings, though, I come back to the idea that it’s not really a “collective solipsism,” as he so eloquently put it (I LOVE that turn of phrase, by the way. Poetry in two words, that!), but rather an instinctual need to be part of a larger whole. I haven’t quite reached clarity on this point yet - and I may never actually get there - but I’m still struggling with the idea that singularity is not our default position. We were never intended to live as isolated units, confined to a small and static group of family and friends and destined to live within the boundaries of those same influences for all our lives.

I think, really, that we were intended to live as tribal beings; that we need the company of a vast collection of “others” (if such a distinction can be made, but that’s fodder for another post) who can fill in the missing bits of us, can teach us things so that we don’t HAVE to stumble over the lessons ourselves (though many of us still insist on doing so), and challenge us to think in ways that increase our being. Along those lines, we want the validation of being accepted as a member of that tribe, of knowing that our own thoughts and lessons and thinking are valid and valued.

In the end - for me, at least - it all comes down to an investigatory exercise of oneself. I’m relatively certain that the impulse to blog is a shade different in everyone, and that one blogger can have different motivations for posting every different entry that gets published. Sometimes, I want to vent; sometimes, I want to release a bit of creativity into the world; sometimes, I want an answer or an opinion or just to know that someone’s out there listening. The overriding need, though, is to belong. To belong to a vast collection of “others” who have something to offer me - and I to them.