A friend asked me a couple of months ago why it is that I don't have a blog. The response that came to me at the time was that I’m just too private of a person. I don’t feel the need to share my life story, or the inner workings of my mind with the world wide web… or even with many of my friends. I have a paper journal to fulfil my self-reflection needs - a place where half-formed thoughts, confused musings, and embarrassing secrets live. But ever since the question of why I don't blog was asked, the idea of ‘Kalea the blogger’ has been dancing around in the back of my head, and I feel that it may be time to experiment. It's an interesting art form, this blogging thing.
It’s always been easy for me to come up with reasons to not blog, but last night, in another conversation with a different friend, I finally came up with a good reason to blog. Maybe my paper journal doesn’t, after all, fulfil my self-reflection needs. Yes, it’s important to write in a space that is in no danger of being read by anyone but myself. But where do those half-formed thoughts find completion? What’s the point of spending so much time in introspective contemplation if I never force myself to complete the train of thought? A blog may be the motivation I need to wade through all those confused musings and vague almost epiphanies. A blog is always some kind of performance, my friend tells me, but I’m not doing this to perform. I want you to read this not because I want you to read it, but because I want to write it. And I know that I won’t write it unless I know you’ll read it. Does that make sense?
* I'm aware that the whole tree in the forest riddle is so overused at this point that making reference to it has probably gone past funny to just plain pathetic. But I've decided that being in my last semester of an undergraduate degree done predominantly in western analytic philosophy (which at this point has also become, in my opinion, just plain pathetic), I can almost get away with it.
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