A beginning on an average Thursday

I have been telling myself for a long time now that I was going to do this, and the only way to start, like with anything, is to start...

I have no pretense that I have anything profound to add to our collective understanding of where and how and why we live, but there are times when I feel that there is something to be said that I have not heard, be it regarding how we treat ourselves, our fellow travelers, our communities or our world. I find myself at times wondering if others see some of what is and goes on around us the same way I do, and I love intelligent dialogue with both those I agree and disagree with. If you don't listen to those with a different perspective than you, all you do is wall in yourself and you never learn anything you don't already know... and what you know lessens in value the less you allow out to be challenged. Like any muscle, an unused mind atrophies over time and eventually can only sustain what it already is. One of my desires in life is to have my last words to another be "I didn't know that".

I have been privileged to have been well educated and a little well traveled, and have so far lived a life full of unspeakable joy and unbearable pain, as have most of us. I am fascinated by history and what it means, by how we make and use places, by different approaches to and attitudes toward God, and by how we function as a society. I have been very active in the recovery community for well over a decade, am deeply spiritual but not religious, progressive in my social thinking, and sometimes open-minded to a fault. I am often adamantly wrong about things, but see ideas much like a scientist sees a theory... test it, experiment with it, look at the results, learn from it, and change or adjust as the evidence leads you.

I am not interested in just blabbing about what I see or think or feel about any given thing. My hope is that this will be a place for some insightful dialogue on whatever I see or wonder about, despite what I often see pass for conversation in this age of anonymous online ranting and intellectually gated communities.

This is a pretty thin beginning, I realize, and the next installment will hopefully get into some things I see going on around me these days that has me wondering about how we should and do treat those all around us.

Let the conversation begin...