I've been putting this off for months now. But finally, here it is, my first baby step towards actually writing regularly. It's taken a lot of soul searching, failed attempts, free writes, scratches of notes, conversations saying “I really wanna write” and finally manipulating myself to actually make any headway writing. In the past, I noticed I'd only update my journal when I was feeling sad, or melancholy, and writing would act as a nice therapy. But more recently, since my life has been in a grand state of happiness, whenever I've sat down to actually type stuff out, my mind goes blank and my motivation plummets. This has been a bit of an puzzle for me, because most of the other time I do want to write. For the most part, I live in my own mind. Throughout each day, my mind buzzes with thoughts that I want to expand and explore, ideas I want to share with the world, and observations and questions that I want to discuss with other people. Often though, I forget, I don't write a good idea, or I don't know who'd be interested in hearing refine ideas.
Aside from being a good way to remember and iron through ideas, I want to write as a way to record my life progress. Since I last wrote, I've changed drastically. Actually, I've always been changing; everyone and everything constantly changes. There really isn't anything permanent in this world except change. Personal growth and development is something very hard to track, and looking back at your own history is very difficult to do objectively and accurately. One of my strongest life philosophies and goals is to continually self improve. A prerequisite to measuring one's progress is knowing what you were like before you changed. As such, I want to write as a way to maintain a permanent record of my prior thoughts, so that myself and others can better see who I was and how I got that way.
But, perhaps the most selfish and driving factor for writing is that I want to share and hammer out my life philosophies. I am averse to talking about myself unsolicited; but really feel like others can benefit or are interested in what I have to say. Everyone has problems and nobody has everything figured out, sharing small slice of knowledge may help someone have an epiphany of their own. I love that feeling of “getting it,” and I hope to share that with as many people as possible. While that sounds rather altruistic, at the same I suppose I just want to share my ideas just to make sure I'm not crazy (everyone else is =P).
I'm sure there are more reasons why I want to write that I'm not even aware of. There are however, definitely things I know I do not to write about. I don't want to merely jot down my day to day activities. I want to write to allow people to know me, give insight into how my mind ticks. I don't want to just give facts about me and my mundane activities. For instance, I could tell you a lot of facts about me, and you still wouldn't know that much about me:
I'm Brian C Brandes, a 22 year old web developer (software engineer). I have a girlfriend named Erin and we've been dating for a couple months over 2 years now. I was born and raised in Sullivan County, NY, but now live in Boston (I've been here for a little over a year now). My parents divorced when I was 4 or 5. I was valedictorian of my high school and went on to get a bachelors from Alfred State College in three years. My favorite color is green. I could probably use a haircut.
Honestly, those things are well and good, but it doesn't really tell you that much about me. This is exactly what I don't want to write about. It doesn't give anyone insight into my mind, it doesn't allow anyone to predict how I'd behave in a situation, it doesn't let my personality shine through, and it wouldn't be of any immediate use to anyone. At best, it may give you some vague inclination that I'm somewhat intelligent, but I don't think anyone could size me up from those details and genuinely think “that's a cool cat” or “I want to be his friend.” If just from those details you do, well, you're probably superficial and wouldn't make a good friend. So, if you are reading this not to get a blow by blow on my life history, good, because, this following paragraphs are a better example of the crash course of stuff I do want to talk about:
I strongly believe in self awareness and self-criticism. Perpetually questioning and interrogating your own ideas, actions, and emotions is the only way to be certain you aren't deceiving yourself. You must continually change and reevaluate your own beliefs, because it's so easy to forget their basis. Not knowing the 'why you believe it' portion to your beliefs and opinions opens you up to self-contradiction and undermines the whole purpose of having beliefs. How can you truly believe something and not know why you believe it? You can't! Every time you act on such unfounded beliefs you open yourself up to hypocrisy. You can't be certain you're right. In fact, you pretty much can't be certain about anything, much less something and fragile malleable as ideas. So time to time, from the ground up, you need to rethink and reevaluate your previous beliefs, incorporating what you've learned up to date. Otherwise, you just let your mind grow comfortable and idle. In doing, you undermine progress, leading to stagnation and unhappiness. At least, I'm pretty sure.
I feel this belief, and much of life philosophy in general has developed rather reactionary. In that, I notice things I hate about people and I've tried to justify to myself why they're wrong—I'm sure everyone does that though. But, unlike most people, in trying to justify my seething anger and belief the other person is wrong, I've realized many times, that I am imperfect as well. I, too, may be doing the same behaviors and actions that bothered me when someone else did someone. It's hard to objectively judge yourself and it's so easy to judge others. But really, unless you know yourself, you don't have your own moral system. Your morals are just what you have to incorporated from other people mixed with justifications for emotions. It's shocking how often you find in life people that have the audacity to judge others when they either do not know their own why their basis for judging them was developed, or are just echoing what someone else *cough*religion/media*cough* told them to believe. You should have to prove your morals to yourself before you can attempt to prove someone else's incorrect.
But I digress, rants like that are just the tip of the iceberg. I hope in future posts to expand more on how I apply these beliefs to my own life, expand on others, and what not. But, there are so many more things than just philosophy I can rant about. As such, I'd love to hear all of your input on what YOU want to hear about, because quite frankly, it motivates me a lot more to write knowing someone wants something and not just me. So, here's a quick brain storm of topics I'd write about, if any of them interest you, let me know:
- Weeds analysis (the tv show)
- Favorite foods
- my life goals / plans
- coping with life / how I feel others cope
- Handling my emotions
- Learning to not trust myself
- religious rants / bashing
- the ideal girlfriend
- friendships: the wide variety I have, their purpose, nad how they've all changed
- life management
- fantasy basketball
- my joie de vivre
- family development / growing up / interactions
- How I conduct conversation
- Why lying sucks
- How I view myself
- How it's hard to judge the world being locked in your own mindset
