It's so silly. How do we get so wrapped up in our own lives that we forget other people? We get so into categorizing ourselves and others that we forget that there's a person behind that face. I'm living a suite with girls that I should have known going into it were kind of living a different speed than I am. It was going to be hard. Everything about their facebooks annoyed me, but I didn't realize it. Or I didn't allow myself to act on my judgments. In them I saw an opportunity to learn how to "be on time, be tidy, be presentable, be courteous etc." but I've found that all that really amounts to for me is me learning to be uptight, perfection oriented and stressed, even isolated. And the thing is that they don't feel that way as much as I don (I suspect). When you put yourself in a situation filled with people who are completely differnet from you, there are going to be consequences. This goes against my ideal that we can all get along, and that we can all have common ground. I'd like to see these efforts as making me similar to Obama in his pragmatist approach to I'm so interested in how people relate and get along with eachother though. I find myself constantly experimenting to see if I can thrive in certain groups, trying to find my identity. A really valuable lesson that I just learned is that well a two things, but first is that individual means nothing without others. We don't exist apart from eachother. You can't take some time and think and meditate and create a 'self' for the world. That doesn't work. Is it the tendency from Facebook that prompt us to constantly present ourselves, that encourages this impulse? The second thing is that a one time instance where you live the way you are proud of doesn't garuntee the rest of your actions will match them. The fear of hypocrisy is ridiculous. Being the person you want to be requires constant effort towards the goal. As Obama writes, we must constantly push towards those ideals which we've betrayed more times than we can remember. Another thing that makes me hesitant to start a blog though is that I fear the things I think about, are questions that more extroverted people know/seem to know the answer to based on their inclination towards others. But is there merit in actually putting it down in words? I think there has to be an understanding and a patience for other people though. And I think at least for me, by putting it down in words/ being able to articulate it, it can help others who don't know it and I can be sure of its own truth/validity. I very much need to know why I feel or think or do things.
That urge has always annoyed me though. It makes me feel like I think that I am unique in that, and that my "revelations" are sooo important. They're not. People know this and think this and act on this everyday and have for years before me. For myself, it is important to articulate this, because then I can defend it when I run up against people who live according to a different theory, it's a gaurd against their logic. Because though there are the same questions, answers, which seems to suggest that there is an underlying truth (which would make sense because at the end of the day over time we are all human) we are living in a different time and the applications and implementation would have to change in order to respond to it. It needs to be real for us, so that we know we are living up to objective thinking. It's hard to do that with ourselves because we can't be objective, we are biased.
