Thoughts at the time
One of those gratuitously paraphrased quotes by some famous author that a buddy from way-back shared with me after reading said author’s auto-biography, or something to that effect.
“If you look back on your life, a choice you’ve made, something you’ve said, a piece of work you’ve produced, and feel anything other than embarrassment, you haven’t made very much progress.”
Now soak that in for a bit.
It’s the cyberspace equivalent writers block when one has to succumb to blogging about blogging, but I charge you to bear with me, there is insight to be found in this.
This has gone on for a month now – my little attempt to post something at least once a day. I didn’t really think either of these would happen, that I my daily blogging efforts would last this long, and that I would run out of things to write about.
I direct your attention back to a post that I made two weeks ago on Reflection where I detailed the idea of an input and an output of a person. I’ve come to conclude that in order to produce meaningful output, one needs input, and above that, one needs to engage the painstaking process of curation at that end.
Needless to say, I haven’t been quite so diligent with my input. One could say that I’ve been writing out of my reserves – latent thoughts that have gone stale, and perhaps a little unpalatable.
Consider this a lesson learned.
So here’s to a second experiment in writing – where mindful input hopefully leads to meaning writing.
Thank you for keeping with me.
As a somewhat unplanned sequel to an earlier entry Consuming vs Producing, I’ve come to discover an extremely crucial but largely invisible process called reflection.
Just over the weekend, I had the privilege of sitting in on a discussion about how the Christian biblical text is still relevant to the modern day human being. Putting aside all religious and moral connotations, what struck me most is the way engaging the text opens up a fertile space for personal reflection. The speaker stated it far more poetically – “finding yourself in the text”.
While I wouldn’t be so brash to claim that the biblical text is the sole and ultimate text for personal reflection, such a thought has open my eyes to this process of reflection that sits squarely between consumption and production. Input and output if you will.
Within the bounds of reflection lies our truest most present state; and by existing between in and out, it stands to bear the full brunt of everything that passes through. Think of reflection as a footbridge that spans two divides: all the good and evil that we’re impressed by, and all the things that we express.
The really tricky thing about reflection is how unassuming it is. Perhaps by nature, or more likely because we’ve learned to squelch this very potent process. If you’re anything like me, you’d have guard houses set up on both sides of the bridge. On the “in” side, sifting through events and ideas that we allow to pass, depositing their footprints; on the “out” end, filtering the things that we expose to the external world.
So why the big deal about such an ethereal concept?
Because these is the arena where good and evil duels. It is in this place that the human condition triumphs or topples over in shameful defeat. I might even go so far as to claim that reflection is the portal through which inspiration enters the tangible world as we know it.