Mindful-fun-da-mentals

Explorations of mind, paths, and life

Humans are Strange

Posted on June 14, 2008 - Filed Under self reflect

My only followers, graciously, are family. Sometimes I wonder if that is good or not. I really enjoy my blogging time lately as a respite from the piles of jobs I have, and as I often teach the students, CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) often opens up a level of honesty that F2F (Face to Face) can not. Computers allow us to put down our inhibitions a bit more, and intimacy develops much more quickly in online communities (yes, I said much more – grammar grammar!). And day to day, what I post is what I feel at just that moment in time, and as far as feelings go, those can be an amalgamation of emotions that intensify or ease. Either way, it does not make up all that I am. It is just a sliver of who I am, on that day, at that moment, with just those feelings.

Why do I write this now? Well, perhaps it has to do with reading over 80 journal entries of students in the last 8 hours (and another 90+ more to go), or perhaps stumbling upon a load of internet drama that I have NOTHING to do with, yet impacts me because it leaves me questioning what it is that I am putting out into the world. Just what am I leaving myself open to? Do I have the courage to deal with what is out there?

My students write with such honesty and depth the last few classes, having gained a world of insights as they try to make meaning of all the information I have given them. They hint at the level of vulnerability they have, or glow with pride at the conclusions they have made. And not unlike the blogs I bump into, I enjoy reading their story, seeing the world in new ways, with other meanings. Unlike my students, who share one-on-one with me, my sharing is open and public. I put my life up for display, selectively, yet I can not control the way it is received by ANYONE who comes upon it in their meanderings online. I am seeing that cruelty & judgment exist out there on the web, just waiting to find a situation in which to pass judgment and criticize the writer, regardless of all that they (critics) do not know. I am just as vulnerable.

So, here I have been following a very small group of Twitterers – VERY SMALL – and discovered somewhat randomly between twittervision and other twitter’s intriguing thoughts, a whole community of individuals whose posts tickle my need to connect and remind me that my experience is one of many. All this stuff gives me moments to visit the world in a new way. Yet, today, I am washed over by a tumbling mass of tweets, comments, and blog2blog swordplay (or serenades) about the lives of several bloggers, and I see that as much as I would like to believe that the world can be trusted, it just isn’t so. Several bloggers in all this have even considered “shutting down” their blogs due to the turmoil. Dooce, one of my favorites, but uninvolved in THIS particular mess, mentions in her own posts her concern (and she is good at counter-commenting) with the ugly comments that arrive at her site. And when I read messages of self doubt on any blog, my innards SCREAM!

So I planted a post on one of the fulcrums of all these blogs I have explored in the last hour; a final remark to the ways in which a handful of individuals in the world just can’t stop themselves from believing they somehow need to get involved in a turmoil that has NOTHING to do with them. Yes, I planted a comment- and got involved – indirectly, in something that has nothing to do with me. Not because I needed to change anyones mind, but more to remind myself that all that crap exists, and I needed to protest.

It went like this:

“Hmmmm. The blogging world becomes just so strange at times. It seems that there will always be over-righteous individuals who have nothing better to do with their lives than to judge, criticize, and devour a world they see as weaker, faithless, and lacking their own self-absorbed moral climate. Essentially, they are social Nazi’s and in a world of expression we really need to let such cruelty and uneducated words roll off us and understand that all the vicious, judgmental name-calling has NOTHING to do with US as humans, and everything to do with THEM and the fears they hold about their own deepest self. Yes, I just name-called. I am just sad that any writer, whether sharing their personal lives online in blogs, books, poetry, or music, would shove their creative spirit into the closet because of the handful of social Nazis, forgetting that there are oceans of people who read, learn, appreciate, relate, heal-from, heal-with, and (oodles of other positives can go here) self explore because you (writer) have had the courage to write.

I hope you will reconsider, because the human experience is so profound, and being here means a lot to many more than you may know.

I will likely plop this comment on a few other blogs in this network, because I really enjoy knowing there is a community of others who share their lives, and I am silently a part of all that, though no one knows me along the way, but I still feel connected.”

And so, I reflect, in so many more ways than I can list here, of how strange it is to be human, with emotions that create so much STUFF.

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