In recent months the various pulls on my time have regularly conspired to erode the blogging community I know and love to a silent crowd viewed from a passing car window. I contemplated parcelling the blog up, labelling it neatly, and placing it somewhere safe - to take out from time to time and admire.
I didn’t do it because something occurred to me.
Life has a habit of sneaking up on us from time to time, and the unimportant consumes us. No matter how selfless we might like to be, we forget the most important thing to look after is number one. It pays to invest - to find something for yourself, that belongs to nobody else.
Your thoughts belong to you, and you alone. The words you share are a manifestation of those thoughts, and as such are a piece of you shared with those who might listen.
While immersing myself back into the worlds of Twitter and Tumblr recently as a poor, shallow alternative to those of us expounding our thoughts during the midnight hours, I found myself thinking about comments; about their importance or unimportance. One could argue that the solicitation of comments is no more than a form of attention seeking. The lack of feedback afforded by Twitter and Tumblr brought unexpected clarity.
Feedback from the passing crowd reminds us that we are not all the same. The differences make people interesting - without them our stories, views, and opinions hold no interest. Conversely, concordant feedback affirms that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves - that we are not alone in our thoughts and opinions. We are not quite as weird as we perhaps thought.
Weird is good though. Everybody needs to embrace their inner weird sometimes. The really weird stuff is always the most interesting, and yet typically it is only discovered by those closest to us - those we share our life with.
If you happen upon this philosophical navel examination of a post, thankyou. Thank you for taking the time. Now go embrace your inner weirdness, and share a little of it with the world.