With the 92 days of summer whittled down by three already, I still have not yet settled on some unifying theme to carry me through, and it may turn out that keeping a variation on Oprah's gratitude journal––a smug journal, maybe?––will be my summer project. I'm keeping all options open.
A friend sent me this link, which is very close to just what the doctor ordered, and for which I am grateful. I'm going to be doing it, but not in this space.
As a consequence of encountering the #Trust30 website, I've been reading over the Emerson essay "Self-Reliance," and it's definitely going to take me more than one reading to absorb it. It's possible that 92 – 3 = 89 more readings is exactly what I'll need. But my initial impression is that Emerson makes a pretty good case for blogging: Value your own thoughts, and while you're at it, go ahead and express them––before you miss the boat and find someone else has beat you to it:
Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Therefore, I'm going to take back what I said yesterday about my misgivings about blogs and blogging. I'm all for it now. Crystal, I apologize.
So, I changed my mind. So what? That's Emersonian, too:
. . . if you would be a man speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! . . . Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
And there you have it.
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| I think a field trip might be in order. |
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