It is nearly a month since I rambled in this blog and things are progressing albeit slowly.
For a while I considered travel writing as my genre but here in this blog it is something more abstract, which perhaps could come under religious writing. Sometimes I am just entertained by something ironic that I want to share, or something that I think is worth saying because it is beautiful or worthwhile thinking about, sometimes it could be plain comedy.
I have therefore created another page for devotional writing, everything else will be put here under heading of ‘Ramblings’. That is until I feel that there is another subset that can be labelled separately and drawn attention to as a separate thing. This definition somehow makes me happy because I like things to be organised and arranged neatly. Not that this applies to my desk!
It all comes down to a need to index and categorise my world, this is a very western way of navigating the world. You see now I can write something and put into a category and you will be able to find it along with everything else I have done that is similar. Perhaps even more significant I might be able to find it myself!! But then again I have this category of ‘Ramblings’ where I can put anything that does not fit into an index. This ably demonstrates the weakness of 'The West', in that it does not cope very well with things that don’t fit in, or indeed fall outside the definitions that have become established.
Indexing and categorisations are powerful tools and have enabled many of our modern efficiencies to work. Correct organisation and administration is essential for many institutions to run well and we all benefit from this new way of looking at the world. But we are also all victims of this way of working. We find ourselves being labelled and often feel that we have been reduced to a smaller version of ourselves, we rail and rant about the inadequacy of the systems which do not allow us to express more than a simplified view of ourselves, we are insulted and feel dehumanised. Yet even worse are those moments when we put ourselves into a category as a way of staying safe or of hiding. We say ‘oh, I don’t do music or poetry I’m a scientist’ or ‘I am a businessman’. Maybe we say ‘I don’t do religion I am just not that type’, or sometimes ‘I don’t do relationships I am just a loner’.
Every time we accept a label or category we are in danger of closing a door that could lead us into the very life we long for.
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