Welcome to my new blog, Stray Thoughts!
My name is Dave. I'm 26, live in Connecticut, and aside from my day job working in mental health services, I spend much of my time reading, writing, and playing with ideas. Wanting a more public outlet for my thoughts, I started this blog as a way to share the content I'm consuming with others and relate it to the rest of my life.
That last point is important. I tend to be the "disembodied mind" type, walking around with my head in the clouds, oblivious to the world around me. To balance this, I'm focusing on ways to actualize my ideas, to apply them to my everyday life. What good is a theory of compassion, for example, if you're not using it to actually become more compassionate to the people in your life?
As a result, my personal writings (now in my journal, soon to be in this blog) focus not only on ideas and texts, but on my lived experience of them. If I'm writing about a poem, I'll eschew textual criticism to focus on how the poem made me feel. Emotions have their own intelligence, and my visceral reaction to a text tells me more about my relation to it than an intellectual analysis alone ever could.
I intend to post new content every few days, alternating between shorter posts which give some brief thoughts on one topic/text, and longer posts that incorporate multiple sources to dive deeper into a particular subject. To give you an idea of what I'll be posting, here are some posts I'm planning for the very near future:
- brief analyses of single poems by Dylan Thomas, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Fernando Pessoa
- a longer piece on Schopenhauer and philosophical pessimism
- reactions to Carl Jung's Red Book, which I'm currently reading
- thoughts on the current presidential race and what I'm looking for in a candidate
I'm still figuring out how to "blog" in the first place, so it may be slow going at first. In addition to the creative content, I still need to flesh out the rest of the site, tweak the design, integrate social media, and secure a source for stock photos. And I'm still not sure if this will be just a repository for my writings or if, like a garden, it'll grow into something bigger. We'll see.
“A garden is a place where growth is found. It has its own source of change. One does not bring change to a garden, but comes to a garden prepared for change, and therefore prepared to change. It is possible to deal with growth only out of growth.”
That's all for now. Thanks for reading!
