Common advice to writers often includes ‘know your audience’ and ‘write about things meaningful or beneficial to them.’
Well, I don’t have an audience, but I’m willing to share. To be honest, I don’t much like the welcome to my site and feel like I will forever tweak it. The web is changing. It’s hard to keep up, and I’m quickly becoming a dinosaur when it comes to these things. Identity is a funny, often fickle, thing and it’s amazing at how much orientation plays into things. Or maybe not at all, and in 2021 when I’m writing that’s just an absolute given.
Guess it depends on who you are.
It is so easy to take for granted things that you know. And language is so funny – so often, the multiple reads on the same words one could take. In this case, the two strongest interpretations for me are – easy to take your knowledge for granted and no longer test regularly vigorously to ensure it’s true. Or, easy to have your worldview; framework, shape or provide answers for you that strike you as apparent yet to others seem less so. The culture of any field, and the nuances that seem obvious to take into account for people well-acquainted with matters vs the uninitiated.. it is easy to forget that what strikes you as obvious may not be so for those around you.
And so it is with good-hearted cheer that we must proceed throughout our day!!
I am interested by the credentials people choose to state. The various appeals, subtle and not, that occur through this process. Relatively important. Ultimately, not.
Why is this? Relatively, yes in medical matters you would take the advice of a doctor over the advice of a bum. Ultimately though – you should be applying the same rational and logical tests to all information you receive, regardless of source. The most damaging information often comes through otherwise reliable sources.
When writing, I find it hard to avoid equivocating with myself, getting caught up in the minor slicing of detail. When I bring this habit into speech I think my partners find it disorienting and disengaging. When I bring it into writing it leads to run on sentences, or often a stoppage of progress altogether as I finagle back and forth between meanings and expression.
Sometimes I let on less than I know. Sometimes I over-project. It is hard to see the reason in myself at times when I do.
So I guess the question still remains. Why am I doing this? Is it strange that I feel like I prefer not to answer, that it’s obvious enough? And so I rest in ponderance, reflecting on these lovely, inconsequential questions.
I believe strongly in the social good. Already at the second sentence I feel like I need to back up , to establish another thread, before I can come back to fully explore this one. And so it goes, with systems and networks of understanding.
I am not surprised by talk of neurons and synapses, with languages of connections and nodes, bundles and threads etc. The general structure of it. A framework. If I was more into electronics and computers, I may say something like ‘a mainframe’ , but then, I’m sure the actual electronics and computerists would let me know I’m doing it wrong. But I often consider things through the lens of a framework of understanding. I hate to even say it, but I think it’s a ‘meta’ approach to understanding understanding.
Because if our understanding of the world is of such importance to our experience of it, and it is, does not the rub therein lie at how we do our understanding?
I don’t know that I would call myself a Buddhist. I have been heavily steeped in the Buddhist tea, you could say, but when it comes to whatever you want to call that – religion, spirituality, something else – most conventional understandings as presented to me through upbringing, school, education, have felt like clothes that do not quite fit right.
But there are genuine nuggets of wisdom there.
When you are building a tapestry, where do you start? I’m sure the people who build tapestries could answer that. Or basket weavers maybe. When it comes to weaving threads of ideas – well, the people I read all seem so good at it. I could say something aspirational like ‘I hope that some of what I write embodies the essence of the true dharma, and reflects and spreads – propagates – throughout those impacted through my words and actions, to improve the lot of all sentient beings – what a mouthful some of this can be, though that really does extend to include animals, trees and plants, and would include other forms of life we haven’t fully discovered yet – and help provide them access to perspective and means of practice to help benefit both themselves and others yet further.’ That is probably closest to the truth, in terms of the why of the matter.