Dusting off this blog, I found this scrap laying around. It says that I started working on it in October 2010, and haven’t touched it since November 11, 2010. But upon rereading it, it was still mostly inline with my thinking today (though I’ve not changed the ways it’s not), and makes a nice statement of the things I want to start doing here again. And while I’m trying to write here again, I’m struggling to put sentences together in ways I like. So until I’m better at doing that again, I hope this will help tide us over.

This isn’t meant as a mission statement. I just saw recently that I’ve made a series of choices in my 25 years of life, most of which were not well considered, that has led me to a peculiar place and given me a strange sense of certainty about what I want.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be the best person in any discipline, or really even in any discipline. There are already plenty of people doing well-defined things in well-defined ways with varying degree of skill. I don’t want to do that. At the risk of turning this essay into a minefield of cliches, I have no desire to follow anyone’s footsteps or be perfectly good at something many other people do.

While I’m willing to fit myself into such a system for a roof over my head and food in my belly, I have no desire to spend my energy pursuing, enabling, or realizing someone else’s vision. Other people’s visions are always coming from a place of other people’s values. If it’s not for me, I’m not going to spend any more effort on it than I have to.

More than anything else in myself, I seek the most divine state of existence: complete harmony with everything. It’s kind of at odds with the system in which I was raised, but I’m really certain that I don’t get anything from victories over other people, companies, or countries. Any short-term good feelings that come from beating you or someone else has two often-missed downsides: I suffer  when  you win a victory over me, or when I get bored by winning victories over you. Either way, competition cannot satisfy me (or anyone else) in the long term.

The only thing I know that can last long term is peace. The understanding I’ve gained about the world that allows me to take my lumps and keep on going is the only force worth cultivating. Pursuit of this is the only one I have any desire to engage with over the long-term.

If I dare to dream for a second, if I were to realize complete peace within myself I would have the power of understanding deep enough to realize a love that has no match. That would be a great gift to the world, and it is for that reason that I seek, in ways that sometimes appear selfish, to truly come to a complete understanding of the world.

But I also know that that state of complete personal peace isn’t something that does well when hurried or that’s likely to come when tugged with a great deal of force. And so the greatest period of my life will almost certainly be a journey toward that objective. And on the way I hope to do things of value.

I hope, essentially, for the ability to share what I have learned and what I’m working on learning with people who could benefit from those things. I’ve had little luck so far finding such people, and so I’m putting into writing what it is I’m working on.

That, more than anything else, is what this blog is. It’s place I have put and will continue to put things I think are valuable that I know, or am trying to know, or stuggling to understand. Some things may seems only tangentially related to that bigger goal, but I had my reasons.