Most of us rarely have the time nor the inclination to keep thinking about issues big and small. Instead, we simply react. We react to whatever might be the issues of the day. We react when the death of someone we know makes us think about our own mortality. And then we forget that we are mortals and live as if we do not have any expiration dates printed on us. We react when a draft of a Supreme Court opinion is leaked, or when Republicans vote for tax cuts, without articulating for ourselves what the public policy priorities ought to be and how we would defend those priorities.
Blogging, writing, allows me to go above and beyond reflexive opinions. It gives me the space to think through. It grants me the ability to go back to old posts and check for myself whether I am consistent, or if my views have changed. I am not opposed to changing my views either. I agree with John Maynard Keynes in an approach where we change our opinions if the facts change. I do not want to live in a world of alternative facts.
At the same time, I recognize that I am not maintaining a personal journal. I am not writing my thoughts down in notebooks that nobody else reads. Notebooks that somebody will have to toss away after I am gone. Here I am expressing my thoughts in the open for anybody to read. Why?
Elizabeth Corey writes that "writing is profoundly and unavoidably social." Henry Walden Thoreau, for instance, lived for a while a simple life away from cities and in the natural settings in Massachusetts. It was all about self-reliance and simplicity and self-realization. Yet, he wrote a book about it, which is why we know what he did and thought! Why did he write a book if he lived that way for himself? It is all because Thoreau, like the rest of us, is a social animal. We like to engage with fellow humans, we want to engage with them, even if we dream of going off-grid and living by ourselves. We want to suggest to others that there is a different way to look at the world and to live in it.
Corey writes:
Writing is at once a process of clarifying our own thoughts and communicating with others. "Am I correct in my arguments and assertions," a writer may ask, "or will people disagree and criticize? Will I be helpful in showing readers something they have not seen before, or are my thoughts stale and overly rehearsed? Can I offer the reader a certain kind of empathy, a sort of friendship once removed? Or perhaps charity, or recognition of shared sorrow, or even re-assurance during a time of trial?"At the same time, a writer also wants the attention of readers. Publishing anything at all is a request for others to pay attention, and publication entails the hope that what one has written will receive due consideration. "I have something I want to say, and I want you to hear it," writers implicitly tell the world. The worst outcome is for a piece to go unnoticed, as if it had never been written — dropped stillborn into an indifferent world.
That is not different from what Joan Didion wrote in "Why I Write":
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
After I blog, this secret bully also is forever curious if readers that I know and random visitors to my blog have comments--even though I blog mostly for myself. Note the usage mostly and not only. ;)
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