Happy day to you. 😊
Well, perhaps not surprisingly, I didn’t achieve my goal of getting that post written that I said I was going to write–either of them, actually 🙃. I seem to make these statements of what I’m going to do, and then more often than not, I don’t accomplish the goal for one reason or another.
That’s the danger inherent in outcome-based goals, especially those that include temporal deadlines. I should have made a goal of process (e.g. spend an hour working on the idea). Had I done that, I actually would have succeeded in accomplishing the goal for today. And given that, I’m going t say I succeeded, because I did what I meant to do, even if it didn’t turn out as I thought it would.
😊
Anyway, what I ended up finding as started pondering the topic of what I believed and why was that there’s just so much I still have to work through in my own mind before I can get it coherently down in written form.
My brain is a logical brain, and I think logically and sequentially. I begin at the beginning and work from there. But what is the beginning?
(I truly am a philosopher at heart. 😊)
I feel perhaps somewhat like the philosophers of ages past might have felt as they worked to understand the world around them. Truth is what is most important to me in this path of information discovery. I have no interest in fantasy. I have no interest in being “right” if I’m wrong, even if all the world thinks I’m right.
So… it’s the search for truth that I seek. I’m both a utopian and a skeptic at the same time. I crave and long for and am passionate about building a better world, but I’m also a questioner. Perhaps skeptic isn’t the right word. I questions everything–including myself, my beliefs, etc.
In my way of thinking and being, I don’t do well relying on other people. I seek out the information for myself. I seek to understand of myself. I don’t like to take another’s word for things. Too often, I find that the apparent “experts” are lacking significantly in the understanding of the very subject matter they’re supposedly expert in.
Perhaps it’s arrogant of me, but it’s my experience. I don’t trust “experts.” I question everything. And perhaps it slows my journey down in some ways, but I want the knowledge for myself. I think of Ian Malcom’s statement in Jurassic Park:
“I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you want to sell it.”
Anyway, so I’m starting at the most fundamental intellectual level that I can come up with in my search for truth. I’ve actually wanted to do this for years, and I’m finally about to do it.
The first step? Existence. That’s the first truth, and that’s the beginning of what will likely end up being the my first post in a series of posts of “things as they really are,” according to the understanding of Stephen Frank Carman, be that of whatever value it might be to those not so named (and if there’s another with my same name out there… cool!
Anyway, I worked on that (sitting toward the top of one of the hills overlooking the lower pasture as I pondered). I listened to scriptures a bit today, watched sacrament meeting on Zoom, got my digital piano set back up after moving it all to show my nephew the bed frame that’s stored in the room I sleep in. I watched some educational episodes of various things on YouTube, and here I am writing today’s entry, feeling very unaccomplished for the day but here nonetheless.
#1. I managed to stave off the Sunday blues today by focusing forward on things I’m working on instead of letting myself get caught up in the past or caught up in things that are hard and painful about the present. So… that’s a win. 😊
#2. I’m 21 days clean today, and it’s more than just that: I recognized first thing this morning that today was a dangerous day because I saw the thumbnail of a picture of a woman who I think was even modestly dressed, but my brain went immediately to porn. Seeing that happen, I immediately recognized the danger, told my friend Cory and my mom, and was able to leave it all right there. The split-second flash of the brain feeling drawn to the allure of even the thought of a pornographic picture. Success. It happened again later in the evening. It was harder to be verbally accountable, but I again chose to be. Success again.
#3. I’m grateful that I did manage to make some progress on my philosophical ponderings.
#4. I’m grateful that I was able to get a decent nap this morning and wake up after that feeling awake, whereas I woke up feeling exhausted for family study.
#5. I’m grateful that I’ve been better at doing the higher priority things in my life even when my schedule is out of whack. I’m still prioritizing them first, even if it’s later in the day.
It’s 9:21. I’m closer to my bed time tonight. Hopefully I can translate that to closer to my wake-up time tomorrow morning.
Thought of the Day: “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” Vivian Greene
Loves and hugs, you wonderful people, you. 😊
Lift the World.
~ stephen
Lift the World 