To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Saturday, September 07, 2019
 
I have been toying with the idea of deleting the ‘Haunts’ and ‘Bloggers’ section on the left panel for quite a while now. Those blogs have been extinct for more than a decade and most of the haunts are no longer haunted by me. I always hesitate to make even the tiniest changes to this blog; if someone from those early days were to visit this blog now they would probably feel like they were doing a time travel or something! Neither the template has changed nor the description—I am inclined to remove the ‘hmmm’ and one of the extra exclamation marks from the description too because while it seemed appropriate to the really young person I was then, it seems a bit childish and immature at this time in my life. And yet I won’t want to change the description entirely because for one it is still quite accurate, and two, it would be too dramatic a change. So I guess I will at least do these minor toying-arounds…

The other thing that’s been on my mind a bit is that my blog used to be a completely separate aspect of my identity in my corporate work days. Separate in the sense that whatever I said on my blog could be compartmentalised very easily as forming my personal views and whatever I did in the corporate world was fully in accordance with the organisational views or policies or whatever so that my personal stance or views had nothing to do with my work or decisions. Since entering the academic world and preparing for (hopefully) an academic career, I realise more and more that in this instance the professional and personal where worldview, topics of interest, ideas, attitudes, stances, philosophies etc. are concerned are not really that separate. The entire reason that I moved into academia is perhaps to do what I loved doing so far only on the side—study and analyse the topics I found of interest—all the time. So whatever I say on this blog in terms of how I think about something is not ‘personal’ in the sense that I would not have a completely different way of thinking about the same thing from an academic point of view, because my academic point of view unlike in the corporate context would be my own and not that of my employer. I guess what that means and what I’m trying to say is that I sometimes sense a rather higher degree of self-consciousness about what I’m saying on this blog these days than I did before because in a way I could be seen to be committing myself to a position in more contexts than purely this blog. Of course, human that I am it doesn’t and shouldn’t mean that I can’t change my stance or rethink my position, but somehow I sometimes catch myself feeling the weight of the added consideration.

After some pondering though I have reached the conclusion that I will continue to think of this blog as a purely personal space where I am able to “experiment” with my thoughts and moon about my feelings without being too fettered… or without too many reservations or inhibitions; because it is in the process of experimenting and mooning that I have many a times been struck with clarity and I don’t want to exchange precious doubt that may eventually lead to clarity for pretentious certainty that doesn’t go too far, even if it means risking being proved wrong. I don’t have very many hobbies but this blog is the space where I exercise them freely such as they are… and it shall hopefully always remain so! J

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 1:04 am 0 comments
HOME