Me, me, me
Last year I had a conversation with a Buddhist, during which he remarked that he once tried to spend a day (or an hour or a week - some non-trivial period of time) without using the word "I". Rather like like writing a novel excluding the letter "e", this struck me as an inordinately difficult, yet ultimately pointless task. However, I'll admit my judgement at the time was coloured darkly by the fact I'd taken an intense dislike to the gentleman with whom I was conversing, and since starting writing here, I've become acutely aware of just how "I" oriented my writing is.
Strangely, though, I don't consider that to be a bad thing, since I've gotten used to using my blog as a means of communicating with my friends and family about what's going on in my life. It's all about me after all.
However, since it's worth looking outside of myself every once in a while, I feel it's probably worth directing you to a few other blogs that have caught my attention recently. The first belongs to Jim, another American braving the wilds of Minnesota. Jim's path and mine have intersected on a handful of occasions over the last few years and his company has always proved a pleasure. His blog is only in it's infancy just now, but his first couple of entries are enough to make me look forward to see how it develops .
Nextly, whilst scanning the logs of my site, I've discovered that a couple of other blogs (or at least their owners) have kindly to linked to me (or at least my blog). These are Watski's World, and The Painted Turtle. Surprised and honoured as I am, I feel it's only fair to reciprocate such favours and have thusly added links to each of these blogs in my side bar (my way of waving and yelling hello to those figures in the distance) .
Hello, by the way. Whoever you may be.
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While I generally favour Buddhism as the religion which seems to have done least harm in the universe - which is what it's about, really, I think your partner in conversation was mistaken at a fundamental level. Firstly, your weblog is of course about you since it's really an interactive journal. More importantly, the only means we have by which to understand the experience of our fellow man is to compare it with our own. When they tell us of grief, we understand by summoning up our own experience and remembering how bad it felt. If you didn't, you would be unable to sympathise or empathise in any way. When you tell somebody about something which has happened to you, and they reply with a story about themselves, it's not merely a tit-for-tat: it's the respondent's way of identifying with your experience. Ultimately, living within our bodies and our consciousness, we can't possibly do otherwise.