Exploring My Self

Welcome to this blog.  This blog is an attempt to explore my own "self".

I want to understand myself better.  Much of the time, my life seems normal and I don't really think about my inner self.  I have a wife and kids.  I have a job.  Most days I wake up and go to work.  I talk to other people and try to do a good job at my work.  I see movies and watch sports on TV. 

But there are times when I sit back and ask myself what is really going on here.  When I say "here", I mean inside of me.  I am a person, of course, but what is a person?  I know I have urges and thoughts.  Those urges and thoughts lead me to take action in a wide range of ways.  Why do I feel what I feel?  Why do I think what I think?  Why do I do what I do?   Those questions interest me greatly and in this blog I want to try to explore myself so that I can understand myself better.

Many blogs are relatively random in structure and that's fine.  The blogger simply writes about thoughts and events that come to him as he (or she) moves through his life.  I want to organize this blog differently.  I plan to make each post build upon the one before.  So, this first post is an attempt to lay a foundation for what comes next.

But before I get started on that, let me say one thing. I am a follower of Christ. I believe he was born of a virgin, was crucified and rose from the dead. I want to disclose that from the very beginning, but I don't want to write this blog from the perspective of a Christian. That is, I won't assume that the reader of this blog shares my beliefs in that regard.  I want to understand better why I've come to believe what I believe, and to do that I need to go beneath those beliefs and explore their foundations.

Where do I start?  I'm not sure.  Part of the problem is that our own thoughts are absolutely pervasive in our lives.  From the time as infants when we first started to think, we've never stopped thinking.  Our stream of consciousness is an ever-present reality to each one of us. 

It can be very difficult to get our minds around something that is absolutely pervasive for us.  About the best physical analogy I can think of is gravity.  Like our own thoughts, gravity is something that is always with us.  Literally every step we take is impacted by gravity.  Gravity effects every object on earth every moment of the time.  From the time we were babies, we've observed that everything that isn't held up falls to the ground.  It is so much a part of our lives that we don't really even think about it.

In fact, the human race went for thousands of years before anybody even put a name to it.  According to Dictionary.com, the word "gravity" didn't even exist until around 1500 A.D., from the latin word that means heavy. Galileo was the person who really started to study gravity in the late 1500's, and Newton was the one who finally began to understand it and quantify it.

So, if a person dropped a rock in the Dark Ages, did it fall to the ground?  I bet it did.  Gravity was there, even if nobody had explained it or even given it a name.

If you were to visit any ancient civilization, or even a savage culture in the 20th century, and ask them about gravity, I imagine the conversation might go like this (assuming you could speak their language):

"Do you have a name for the force that pulls things downward?"
"Yes, we do."
"Oh, really?  What is the name?"
"Stick."
"Stick?  You mean like a dead branch?"
"Yes.  When we want apples that are too high for us to reach, we use a stick to pull them down to the ground."
"No, no, no.  That's not what I mean.  I mean after you knock off the apple, why does it fall to the ground."
"Why does it fall to the ground?  Because it's not attached any more."
"Yes, but why does everything fall to the gound?'
"Everything doesn't fall to the ground.  Mountains and trees reach into the sky."

I could go on, but I hope you get my point.  If you had never been taught about gravity by somebody else, it probably would have been very hard to notice and understand.

Even now, though we have studied gravity in school and heard stories about Isaac Newton getting hit on the head by an apple, most people never really even think about it. When you look around your desk, do you say to yourself, "Hmm, I see my book and my computer and my desk are currently being pulled to the ground by gravity. There is an invisible force at work here pulling everything toward the center of the earth." I don't.

When we try to think about things that are totally pervasive in our lives, it's just very hard to imagine life any other way.  And it's often hard to see things that are right in front of us. 

I believe we have a similar response to our inner selves.  We are so accustomed to ourselves that we don't notice what is really going on.

In spite of this difficulty, I'm going to try it.  I'm going to try to observe myself and put those observations into words.  I believe this is a topic of great gravity (ahem), and if you find it interesting, I hope you will continue reading.