My journal entry yesterday is short and terse. I really should have spent more time on it, but I thought I'd spend some time and try to type it directly into my computer. I didn't have the ability or desire to actually expound.This way, writing with paper first, is much slower, but much more rewarding. It gives me a revision stage when I transcribe it, too. After I read yesterday's entry, i.e. it was already on GeoCities, I felt a great urge to rewrite the thing.
I'm not going to. Yes, revision is a valid aspect of writing, and it's super-easy to do with electronic documents. But this is a journal. If I could continually revise it, it wouldn't show the progression, the path I'm following.
This journal, written May 15th, isn't just about May 15th nor does it cover the whole day! Its about my life since I posted the last entry, until I post this one. Usually, just one day. So I wind up writing about last night and this morning a ot. Hope that OK wit you.*smile*I write that because I'm purposefully moving something that will happen today off onto tomorrow. Tonight is games night, and if things work out, I won't have time to post this after so I'll post it before.
I talked to LadyDawn last night about online journals. (I showed her mine and told her about OpenPages.) She told me she'd read a few of them. I asked her what she thought. She said, "some of them were depressing."I thought, I don't want my journal to be depressing. It might be, occasionally, but I don't think of my life that way. On one hand I believe that everything works out for the best, and on the other, I know that's just a story I tell.
Both of these together describe what I mean when I say that I have a generally optimistic view of life.
One of the goals in life, I guess, is to answer the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" I don't have an answer, but there is a hope that it makes them better people, and things in general will be better afterwards.
On other, less optimistic days, I realize that bad stuff just happens. So does good stuff. some of both we invite on ourselves, some is mere happenstance. The real question, though, is how we deal with it. An optimist will try to focus on the good that happened as a result of the bad thing, a pessimist on the bad.
That's where the stories part comes in. I'm an optimist because I choose to tell the good stories. The ones with happy endings. The ones that explain how everyone tried to do their best, and despite troubles, came away with something positive.
It's like the guy I know whose going through a divorce. On one level he wishes he'd never married. On another, he really loves his kids, and would never give them up.
Dawn told me that she believes everything happens for a reason. I think this is fundamentally different than "things work out for the best". I think it's true in a physical cause-and-effect way, but I'm not really sure the universe itself is purposeful.
Being alive, being thinking beings, we impose purpose on the world. It only has one, because we insist that it does. Of course, there are 6 billion people, and we don't all agree on what that purpose is. Any purpose that some Generic Joe Schmoe might see, is actually not in the world, but in him, explaining the world to him.
Maybe it is like my optimism. It's still a story we tell ourselves about the world we live in.
I know people disagree with my. They are secure and certain in their knowledge of God and believe God's purpose is the world's purpose.
But I don't know from God. I'm a devout agnostic, remember?
Part of the point of this journal is to tell my story, from my perspective. It's the only way I can tell you who I am.
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