Because I am in a rut with studying, I decided to google my name and see what incriminating things would come up to shame me. Nothing came up for about the first five pages, making me feel not relieved but unimportant and like a failure. Then I found this blog. I had forgotten about it for years and the posts felt new, as if written by a stranger. But not exactly, because knowing that I had written it I could not help but be extra critical of what I was reading. The cliches, the awkward expressions, and just the immaturity of my thoughts. I like to think I have changed since then, matured a little. And because I do see hints of my current self in my past writing I would like to keep these posts, and not try to eradicate them as I do every record of my online activity I come across for fear it would act negatively to my future interest. And then I think, what if that time never comes? What if people never take enough interest in me to want to find out about me, to learn my past? That is an equally frightening thought.
The thing about writing is that while it helps you to gather your thoughts and resolve inner conflicts, it thereby makes that process vulnerable to other prying eyes. I never want to delete my past journals because I always learn something from reading them in the future. Let us hope that at that point in the future, that time I always dream of, enough non-personal, non-incriminating information about me will have flooded the web that this blog will have been buried deep down to insignificance. Okay, enough about that.
Will go to church in ten minutes, eat dinner, then study for real…
These are the only non-academic things I write these days. Plans for what to do during the day, over the next month, year, etc. Never about my feelings or thoughts. It has rendered me soulless. My secondary school English teacher had told me once about the soul in writing. I used to have the seedlings of that soul ready to sprout and bloom, but I have suffocated it from the day I entered college by refusing to read and write. Now I am feeling the repercussions. There is so much great writing out there and I am so lucky to have access to all of it, and the ability to read, in more than one language. To disregard all of that opportunity is to refuse to know about the world in which I belong. More than ever we are given such easy access to the writings of great men and women, to see the world in their eyes and to devise ways of making it better. But at the same time we are refusing to read much more than a twitter post or an SMS message. We are taking what we have for granted.
I want to change the world. There is so much that could be better. We are so far from a Pareto optimum and the movement towards that point requires more than textbook economics. There is more to life than what we see or what the graphs tell us. I feel blind where I stand now.
