As some of you may have noticed, I stopped blogging for about a week and a half. Part of it was probably just me getting over the traditional Nathan Thompson giddiness and excitement and actually settling in to see if I'll do this for a whole summer. But here are two other reasons I stopped blogging (and will hopefully figure out whether it's good to continue).
The first reason is that I don't think I'm a natural blogger. First, I'm long-winded. This may be hard for you to believe, but I like to talk. A lot. And I don't know yet how to effectively convey what I think in a concise and interesting fashion, or at least to the degree that I want to. But I think this gets to the deeper issue, which is that I'm built to be a conversationalist. I can definitely talk, but I love to listen. Perhaps more to my fault, I love to please and I need to know what people think of what I think in order to feel comfortable or validated. As infantile as it may sound, there's a good portion of me that simply wants to be patted on my head and told that I wrote a good blog post every time I write something. Blogging offers none of these benefits, however, because the whole enterprise consists of finding yourself and throwing it out to the murky quagmire of the Internet, in which you can't really receive meaningful feedback or begin a deep conversation. Perhaps this is the nature of art, to be unsure of your effect...or perhaps it's just me being childish and needy, and not receiving feedback makes me more confident in my own thoughts. Or maybe it's a bit of both.
The second reason I haven't enjoyed blogging as much is because it is an inherently self-centered activity (not that all bloggers are selfish, but that the act of blogging is). I actually somewhat hope that nobody noticed that I stopped blogging, because it would give too much weight to what I'm pursuing here. It also has an air of pretense about it, that my musings are in some way worth mentioning. And not that I don't think that my thoughts have some value, but that I'm an individual who spends time coming up what he thinks about certain subjects so that he can pontificate about them and write them down so others can appreciate and admire them. I noticed a change in my thinking the first week I was blogging, in that every interesting thought I had was a potential subject to expound upon. And while I obviously didn't write on everything that I thought of that week, there was a lack of the sort of "internal theater of the mind," in which I alone (and, I suppose, God) can ponder and consider something. Blogging, while increasing introspection, has a propensity to starve the unexpressed thought, a staple of having a healthy mental life. For some reason, I think of Mary in Luke 2, when she "treasures all of these things in her heart;" that the tremendous joy, confusion, excitement, and uncertainty of her child being the Messiah was not a good subject for Instagram, a facebook status, or a blog. Instead, it's proper place was simply within her own heart, needing no further an acknowledgement than herself and God.
So, I'll see if I'll continue to blog. As with all things, there is a good way and a bad way to do it. Hopefully I can continue to learn to blog in a good way.
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