For many of us the biggest obstacle is inertia – probably a result of the mind saying, “that is an outrageously audacious goal… who are YOU to think you can do it?”

Another enormous obstacle for those of us who spend a lot of time in our heads, is the opportunity to disappear into the folds of one’s own navel as we contemplate every angle of the problem.

I don’t know if you live alone now that Finn’s gone, but to get things moving it really helps to converse out loud with another soul, even a dog. I have a walking buddy without whom I’d have disappeared up my own ***hole long ago.

Thanks for responding.

Gardner, thanks for saying “paradoxes” rather than contradictions (!)–Jim points to the clear shortcoming of my thinking here, something I am acutely aware of as I spend hours working on a multimedia project. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new Turkle. When I kid, one of my brothers was gonzo over Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin–he and I shared a wall, and I learned how to enter the complexity of their beautiful, noisy music through that exposure. I know it informs my own turn to silence.

Jim, I agree about needing chaos, too, and noise and worry about all this attention given to slow blogging if it gets all touchyfeely and self-congratulatory. I turn to the bava for inspired, passionate dynamism laced through with extraordinary depth. You are never implicated (except through your love of the donut, perhaps). Perhaps because my own head is a tumult of thought and image, and my own personal way of being in the world outside of my silence is to be noisy as all get-out, I am in deep need of silence.

Ed, have fun with consilience. And thanks for the feedback. I often wonder if I am merely mumbling nonsense or the blatantly obvious.

My own mental platform these days is about the intertwingling of doing and knowing and speaking and remaining silent. Weird platform with unpredictable results–that’s a good thing, I think.

Barbara, you rock my world.

I’m off to play with the word “Consilience”, like a dog with a particularly smelly object found on a snowy walk…

What a perfect quote from Heidegger, whose complex understanding of authenticity never seemed more relevant, as are his idea about truly existing within a moment of crisis or chaos, which I always found exhilerating and frightening.
I have to say it, I always feel a bit implicated when reading your posts, primarily because they really challenge a predominant logic that has this sense of now, progress, move forward, more, etc. that is dangerous and in many ways guided by a logic of consumption. At the same time, we’re consumption babies, unlearning consumption is possibly one of the most difficult things I could imagine, I have been putting off blood test for 8 months now because I don’t want to have to fast for 12 hours—how’s that for decadence?

I also wonder if the new forms that seem to call for a kind of information addiction may not be fodder for a whole new way of thinking language, images, poetry, etc. Is the way we read, consume, and interact with media finally catching up with the forms that have been dominant over the last three decades, i.e. film, video games, internet communication, etc. This is just thinking out loud, but why do so many of the right way to reflect and pace oneself always come back to reading and remaining quiet? What about the chaos of environment, images, media in general—therein lies for me the rapid pace of a city on fire—and I like it far more than the solitude of an unquiet mind. As usual, your posts push me to the edge of not only my thinking, but often my identity—and that is why you are so important to my online habit

I also think about the new book edited by Sherry Turkle, “Falling for Science: Objects in Mind.” In the mindblowing epilogue, Turkle writes that computers typically get used for velocity, when their real strength is possibility.

And I wonder when obsession results from passion, and when it crowds passion out.

And finally I think about the strangeness of how words can convey silence even though they are anything but.

Thanks for this post.