What do I think I'm doing?

This is a perfect day to reassess all the blogging I've been doing here. This is my 1000th post to growing changing learning creating. Here's what I currently think I'm doing by all this reflecting, reading, writing, linking and sharing.

Self expression for sanity - Karl Marx and others have claimed that our self expression is essential for keeping us sane. Getting stifled, silenced or pressured to conform makes us crazy. Without self expression, we overeat, overspend and over consume without finding personal satisfaction. We now realize that this insanity also depletes non-renewable resources while doing lasting damage to the environment. So my blogging is green living that keeps me sane.

Synergistic flow - If all I did was sit down to write and hope that something came to mind, I would have abandoned this blog after 45 posts or so. There's more to this than self expression. I spend a couple hours every morning reflecting on what I've read, written, watched and discussed with others recently. I get 2-5 pages of new thoughts written down in that process. Each day I do lots of reading of blogs and several books that I'm reading concurrently. I rarely experience a shortage of what to write about. The challenge is finding a voice and viewpoint to organize my jumbled thoughts. When I find it, the words come to me easily. I know from experience, there are no shortcuts here. It takes all my reading and reflecting added into the mix.

Articulating possibility space - I realize that I can go where others cannot in the realm of what-if?, what-for? and why-not? We each can explore small portions of the vast possibility space with our unique set of lenses. There are lots of places we cannot go because they don't begin to make sense to us, seem very irrelevant, appear inconceivable or remind of us a painful past experience. When we can go there, we're in a position to care about others who cannot get there, and share what we're seeing. When we give, we get back in return. We get paid intrinsically. In my experience, I get rewarded with more access to possibilities, more understanding of changes in process, more connections between ideas and more pattern recognition.

Beyond the walled city - During the Middle Ages, a few settlements emerged as the beginning of modern-day cities. Each built walls around its perimeter to protect inhabitants, buildings and inventories. There would be periodic market days when the gates would open and outsiders could enter to buy and sell. This led to the outsiders establishing encampments outside the walled cities where every day was an open market day. The cities eventually tore down those walls and incorporated the thriving markets outside its boundaries. Nowadays, there are pay walls in the space of authoring and publishing that keep outsiders from messing with inside intellectual property. Meanwhile, those of us blogging for free in the open market are creating the thriving market of authoring/publishing with Creative Commons licenses rather than copyrights. Eventually the walled city will see their pay walls are costing them dearly and will take them down to incorporate this thriving market beyond the walls.

Thanks for reading me!