I was so happy with the result yesterday that I planned to do more of the same today. Then I wakened later than usual, and not in the best mood. I dealt with kitty behavior issues right away, then I went to the store instead of starting work in the yard. Finally I came home to a hot late morning promising an even hotter day. So I canceled my plans to do more spading and planting, and here I sit indoors with the air conditioner on, wondering why that seems to happen so often. Not the hot weather. That’s to be expected this time of year. But I’ve noticed with many other things I do that when I make specific or detailed plans, they often fall through. Not just gardening tasks.

I realize now that even though I fooled myself for years, dutifully planning my work, both on the job and off, I’m really, at heart, not a planner at all. I’ve told my husband time after time how I like to plan things. But truth to tell, I’ve never actually been much for committing to anything. What I was really saying was probably that I didn’t like anyone else to make plans for me that might keep me from finding my happy accidental tasks. I think it’s because plans seem so often to change — and often for the best — that I’ve discovered this. Plans change. So why bother planning? Of course in the workplace that wouldn’t have flown. In any cooperative effort, plans make sense, because we depend so much on others getting their work done on time.

On my own, who needs plans? Maybe it’s something to do with being a generalist, not a specialist. But in a way I’m like this little cat, self-directed and easily distracted — by the right distractions. Those distractions often become momentary passions, obsessions that frequently happen to turn out really well.

Yes, I could tell myself, “Just get out there and do the damned gardening, like you planned.” But then the joy wouldn’t be in the effort, and instead of feeling good about what I accomplish, I’d be dehydrated, overheated, and feel terrible the rest of the day, possibly tomorrow as well. I know better. So I threw some water on the little transplants, and came inside. Maybe tomorrow morning. . . .

Still I wonder. Why do I get the most done when I don’t plan to? When it’s a spur of the moment, “I think I’ll do this right now” kind of thing? That’s what yesterday’s effort was. I woke up, got dressed, and started right in, because that was exactly what I wanted to do that morning, as soon as I woke up. I woke up inspired. This morning I didn’t. At least not with that inspiration, not with the one I expected.

I notice this is especially true with creative work of all kinds, and with learning, where it’s not the weather that changes things, but something unknown. Just when I wouldn’t think I’d even be in the mood for it, I get a whim and do that different thing, whatever it may be, and that’s when I get the most out of it. I seem to be most productive when I haven’t planned anything at all, when I pay heed to momentary flashes of inspiration or that sudden opportunity. Happy accidents and spontaneous productivity. Do you have them? My life seems full of them. They’re what makes me happy.

Here’s the real mystery: I don’t think it’s just about my mood or how I’m feeling, or the weather. It sometimes seems almost more like a synchronous universal dance of some kind. Sometimes all the pieces are in place, inside me and outside of me.

And it’s not just me. I think there are lots of people, like me, who’ve struggled all our lives to conform to a world that likes plans, schedules, rules. So much so that I grew up, and spent thirty years of adult life, thinking I was more comfortable with plans, schedules, and rules. Actually, as a kid, I never felt right about it. As an adult, I bought into it. Had to, to keep a job. But if that’s the way we should live life, how does one explain all those happy accidents by inventors, scientists, and discoverers through the ages? Granted, a certain amount of preparation took place before those historical happy accidents occurred. But many important discoveries in history weren’t planned. Not the way they turned out. Someone happened by chance to be in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing, or paying attention to what turned out to matter most.

Were they in tune with the synchronous dance of the universe?

For some people, I know this doesn’t work. Planning works for them. That’s great, more power to them. We need planners in the world, and maybe that’s their part of the synchronous dance. Someone has to read the music and keep the time. For me, not planning works. It’s about time I realized it.

Instead of gardening today, what will it be? I won’t know until seconds before I start, or perhaps after I’ve already begun.

This past Saturday, Dave Pollard at How To Save the World linked to an essay in his Links of the Week that he described as brilliant and liberating, and I agree.

The essay, by William Tozier of the Notional Slurry blog, is titled, There are exactly two ways: one, and many. The two ways he discusses are specialization and generalization.

William Tozier proposes the notion that we’re all evolved to be generalists, that specialization isn’t normal. I tend to agree when I consider that many of our forbears were more general in their skills and knowledge than we are. Even today, skills tend to be more generalized in humans living closer to nature, and survival in a wilderness requires a lot of flexibility.

When I think about it, the only things our earliest ancestors planned was to survive, and they were never sure how they would have to do that. The only things they finished were a good meal when food was available, or a new tool or garment when an old one wore out — often taking time to add improvements or embellishments, so even they were never finished. They paused to take in their world and observe it. They learned from everything around them. They were creative, they were nomads, and they were students of life. They paid attention to what came their way, they took them as signs of what they needed to do, for now.

William Tozier discusses the problem of explaining to specialists what we generalists do, how to label ourselves in today’s world. It can be a problem, and I think this must be why, long ago, I started to think of myself as a writer. Aside from having an aptitude for English and composition, a writer has to read and learn about many things in order to do what she does. Writing provides an excuse to research anything and everything, as possibly relevant to a project. Later still I began referring to myself as a creative person, because that can involve lots of different interests too, even more than writing. It can encompass activities that are finished when they’re finished, or never finished, rather than finished to deadlines. Of course writers have deadlines, if they hope to make money at it, and there the generalist has to adapt to the specialized modern world.

I conformed to the specialized world for years, in being a reliable employee and meeting deadlines. I glued myself to my chair and focused on my job. I met deadlines, and earned awards and promotions for my conformity and work ethic. But I wasn’t happy. I didn’t even feel healthy doing that. Eventually it became habit, and I got so I felt uneasy if I didn’t have a plan. So then I was really stuck — uneasy with my schedule and commitments, and uneasy when I didn’t have any.

After a lifetime of thinking I wasn’t doing life right, that I needed to be more energetic, and get more done, finish more things, I feel relief and satisfaction to realize that I’m a generalist and always have been — and there’s nothing wrong with that. It explains so much. Some people may think of being a generalist as a bad thing and call us dilettantes, or unwilling to commit, and some may even think it’s a sign of a problem, one of those recently defined mental disorders for which there always conveniently seems to be a new drug. (When did we start inventing diseases to match the drugs instead of the other way around?) Heaven forbid any of us should be anything but cookie cutter normal, whatever that means. In our culture it apparently means we have to specialize in something, we have to plan everything out, have goals and deadlines, in order to succeed. We have to finish long lists of things, and fill every minute with structured activity.

Today we don’t just have a work ethic, we have a work ethic on steroids.

I for one am ready to stop the madness. If we were intended to plan everything out, then why do we need artificial planners like Daytimers, Palm Pilots, and Blackberries? If we’re supposed to have jam-packed calendars and meetings overlapping meetings, then why didn’t we evolve to keep our schedules in our heads, and to be in two places at once? If we were supposed to travel the same road everyday, then why do we love vacations so much?

Unfortunately, being generalists brings some of us less material success in life, since it’s much less likely that we decide on distinct, well-defined career paths, and even if we do, we get this itch to change careers now and then. We’re looked down on when we tend not to finish things to a schedule — and I agree that makes sense when others are depending on us to finish so they can do their things. We’re often better off working on our own, to our own schedules, which are pretty much nonexistent, and without anyone else depending on us conforming to a schedule. Sometimes we’re called Jacks of all Trades.

Provided you figure out eventually that this is how you’re supposed to be, that there’s nothing wrong with you for wanting less structure and commitment in your life, being a generalist can bring a great deal of freedom and happiness. After all, what makes you happier than being yourself, no matter how many directions that may lead you?

I’m a generalist, and have been all my life. I’m grateful to finally figure this out. Thanks, William and Dave.

We live in a filthy world of our own making, mostly made filthy through our mental twists on reality. It seems strange to me sometimes that when we’re out in wild places no amount of dirt seems out of place, yet in our neighborhoods and especially in our houses it can feel as if the whole of nature is intent on affronting our sense of cleanliness and order. Though my sense of order is weaker than some, I know everyone who lives indoors develops some degree of this need for order. Even the cat, to whom the state of her litter box and blankets matters a great deal, and the dog, who will go through all kinds of personal agony to wait to go outside to perform certain functions (thank God—or should that be Dog), and who gets nervous when I rearrange furniture in the living room. They like their people to be securely in place, too. He got so he knew the sound of my suitcase zipper when I used to travel for work, and would come into the bedroom when he heard it, to give me this look that made me feel like the worst kind of traitor. They both seem to go into fits when we so much as drive to the store, if we’ve been home a lot and they’ve grown used to that. When we return they greet us as returning heroes, and later the dog ceremoniously sniffs the soles of our shoes as if to learn where we’ve been—the usual places, or somewhere strange and exotic?

Orderliness is important to all of us who live under the umbrella of civilization. Not so much in nature, where a broken branch may hang by a thread for two seasons before falling to the ground and lying there for several more, gradually contributing its substance to the soil—what the ants don’t carry away or the termites consume. Maybe that’s order, too, in its way, and our skewed notion of order twists our perception of what is out of place, what must be plucked or added to the woodpile, burned in here so it doesn’t burn or rot out there.

The work of an artist or a writer requires some residual sense of the disorder in nature. A Japanese gardener calculates his design to mimic nature, if in a scrupulous, disorder-bending fashion. A painter avoids symmetry in her compositions. Some of the most amazing paintings I’ve seen depict skies full of drama rather than peace, states of cloud that in real life would make me wish we had a storm cellar. My favorite part of any piece of music is often full of drama, that exquisite break after a heart-rending crescendo. A writer fills his story with conflict, unresolvable problems and sympathetic characters full of flaws who perform acts we would never consider in real life. Why do we love this in artwork? Deep down, do we know everything isn’t supposed to be orderly all the time?

What is all this fuss over cleanliness and order? Can we carry it too far? Is that the reason that now, when our indoor world is in many ways its most orderly, we crave violence in the movies—and it increases in the streets? Is our twisted sense of order what makes us think we should control which two consenting adults marry, and push our religious or political agendas on others? Is it what makes us build walls at borders and regulate language? Is it what makes some people hoard wealth? Is it behind addiction and pornography?

Should order stop at the walls of our own houses? Is order’s purpose simply to help us feel secure in the future of meals to come, fresh water to drink, mortgages paid up? Do we try to make it fool us into thinking we’ll never die? Does it mimic the cycles of the seasons, the regularity of rainfall and harvest? Did order arise along with agriculture? Or did we find it in the vast movement of stars as we navigated seas full of monsters? What is it about order that lends us so much peace that we grow irritable or confused without it? Why do we grow a little insane from too much of it? Does it carry a deeper meaning? Is God order, or is God chaos? Or is God both, a balance, yin and yang? Where should we draw the line? Should there be a line?

Maybe I’ll draw the line today at leaving the vacuuming for tomorrow. It’s late, getting hot out, time to close the windows. Or is that too orderly, keeping the heat out and the cool in? I need to find my balance.

***

To me being privileged means having more than one’s basic needs met, and there are degrees of privilege, and it is relative, and basically meaningless. I’m more privileged than some people I know, and less privileged than some I know. But all I can really say about that is what I see on the surface.

It’s tragic that so few people in the world have adequate food, water, sanitation, shelter, clothing, necessary transportation, education, rest, safety, security, and health care, even some people in the US. Those should be basic, subsistence level expectations, especially considering how far we’ve come technologically in this world. Unfortunately those advances seem to be reserved for the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries, for those living under certain forms of government and economics. Basic civil and human rights should also be considered subsistence level—everyone should have them. Not everyone does, even in the most economically “privileged” countries. We can’t even agree on what civil and human rights people should have.

But I also think many people in the world have a skewed notion of what it is to live under what they consider privilege (i.e. better apparent economic or social conditions than theirs). It looks easier. In many ways it is. It’s no guarantee one will be happy.

Comfort exists on many levels. People in wealthier conditions still get sick (health care doesn’t guarantee health), suffer, die, lose loved ones, fall in and out of love, get abused, depressed, lonely, fearful, deal with pain (much of it hidden and not obvious to anyone else—some physical, some psychological or emotional). They experience disability, addiction, disasters, worries, or slip through the cracks of their society. Many so-called privileged people live very unhappy lives, or don’t only because they overcome adversity no one else would guess at. Just because some people have their basic subsistence levels met in ways that too many in the world don’t, doesn’t guarantee they won’t still lead difficult or even miserable lives. Conversely, among those who don’t even have what we consider the basics, you’ll find some fairly happy people.

A lot of this may have to do with choice, though much of it doesn’t, but let’s face it, being privileged doesn’t guarantee you’ll make the right choices—or that your family members will. Some of this also has to do with individual thresholds. Some of us handle certain types of stress more easily, some have chronic health issues, and some have an inability to think we have choices, even when we do.

So the idea of “privilege” doesn’t really tell you how much one will suffer or how happy one will be.

No one can know another’s pain. We can try, we can develop our empathy and compassion to a deeper level and care about others, try to walk in another’s shoes. But we don’t live the other’s life. To judge what another considers his or her suffering, abuse, or pain, is simply judgmental and likely unjust. Privilege is relative, and can exist right alongside extreme suffering.

So in many ways privilege as we think of it is pretty much meaningless. It seems to me that instead of nurturing a notion of being privileged or not (as if one should feel guilty for being what others consider privileged), it’s more important to nurture compassion, unconditional love, mutual concern. This isn’t to say there isn’t a grossly unbalanced distribution of wealth and power in this world. Obviously there is. It’s also clear that a wealthy person in a position of power is more likely to help his wealthy peers than those he doesn’t consider his equals. But we have to be careful of what we allow to separate us, of allowing ourselves an “us and them” mindset.

The idea of measuring privilege separates us.

The idea of all people belonging to the same human family with equal rights to the basics, and with equal capacity for suffering and happiness, connects us.

***

What does privilege mean to you?

And while we’re at it, Happy Independence Day!

I know a little about this tendency of writers to give up and give in, because I was one of them.

In a sense I gave up on what is probably still my best work to date, by self-publishing rather than continuing to go through rejection and revision. Now I wish I’d kept looking for an agent or publisher, kept rewriting when all the rejections (where anyone bothered to read past the cover letter) pointed out problems. Now what do I do with a book that’s been published first by a POD subsidy outfit and again by me? I’d still like to see it published by a “real” publisher, but I fear that I gave it a premature funeral.

Some good has come of all this. My mother and a few other older relatives got to see my name in print and read the story in book form, before they passed away. I’ll never regret that, but I never intended to give my book such a limited audience. I never will again.

If you don’t want to go the distance, find something else worthwhile to spend all your free hours on. If you want to be a writer, if you know in your heart you’re a writer, go for the gold. Stop reading articles about POD and self-publishing. Stop subscribing to writer’s magazines that print them. The publishing industry may very well be ripe with middle men and favoritism, with big money interests and maybe even corruption. But you the lowly unknown writer aren’t going to change that by self-publishing. Read more articles on good writing, the market, getting an agent. Learn how to structure a story or novel. Give each sentence its due attention. Read more Richard Adams. Read Annie Dillard. Keep writing. Keep rewriting. Keep submitting. Keep rewriting. Keep rewriting. (That bears repeating.) Rework it until you can see your face in it, and submit it until either it’s published or the post office runs out of stamps.

Late in 1993, after a lot of discouraging experiences attempting to sell my fiction, I decided to “quit fiction writing for good” and I wrote nothing but personal journals and technical manuals for a year. I began writing fiction again early in 1995, but with a difference. I did it, as I’d begun as a girl, to please myself, primarily to complete a story I thought had to be written or it would drive me nuts. That story had been percolating inside me since I was seventeen. I surprised myself then by doing some of the best fiction writing I had in my life to that point. My decision at that point to please only myself with what I wrote carried me through a kind of barrier into a different way of looking at writing fiction.

There’s a point where the writer has to throw out all the advice, all other opinions, and write the story that’s inside her, the one that haunts her, that begs to be written. If she begins to do it only to earn money or fame, her enthusiasm may dampen. If she exposes her writing to the wrong kinds of criticism at the wrong time, her passion may be crushed, or she may write more to please others than herself—sometimes so many others that she feels pulled in all directions at once. I’ve done that in the past, and I found myself doing it again recently—writing to please too many others. Maybe from time to time I need to “give up” again, if only to get back on track with the writing I’m supposed to do.

Of course the writer needs to learn the basics, hone her skills. Then, after writing for self, she needs to be willing to let someone edit her work and be open to revisions. The two-minute rule mentioned in the blog Eric referred to makes sense, too. Something in any story needs to draw the reader’s interest in as soon as possible, unless the writer just wants to hide her novel in a drawer and bring it out to read on her own now and then.

But I think a writer needs to begin any work of fiction out of love, a personal hunger to write it. Something has to draw the writer in, make it worth the effort, and perhaps make it impossible not to write. It may very well break the writer’s heart. In fact, maybe a writer has to let a story break her heart a little to do it right. Maybe fiction is meant to break out of one’s heart, the way love does. I usually know I’ve gotten somewhere or succeeded at something in a manuscript, when I find it brings me to some deep, heartfelt emotion.

Writing for myself sounds selfish and not very businesslike, but I think my best writing happens when I do. I’ve learned the most about myself when writing this way, and it’s the most honest writing I’ve done.

Themes emerge in what we write, truths we’ve learned about life show up in our stories, and we sometimes come face to face with our own humanity when we realize what we’re capable of imagining, when we think about what we’d do in the situations we place our characters in. These are things that don’t show up in a story intentionally, but in unconscious, serendipitous ways, through the interlocking and intersecting of seemingly disparate elements. The best writing is in many ways a revelation to the writer as much as to the reader. If getting to that necessitates shutting out what others want from our fiction, it’s worth the effort.

I can’t tell anyone how to make money writing fiction. It’s possible no one can tell anyone how. Publishers seem as mystified as anyone as to what will pay off and what won’t. But I do know how to plumb my own heart while writing, how to answer the call of a story. That’s what has kept me doing this so long in spite of all my frustrations and failures. If all I wanted were to make money, I’d have quit—for real and for good—long ago. I don’t advise anyone to write fiction for money. I plan from now on to write fiction that draws me in a way I can’t ignore and can’t resist. Even so, I know it may break my heart. But anything worthwhile in life carries that risk.

Far be it from me to judge what exactly happened with Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. I haven’t read it, and I don’t intend to—wouldn’t intend to even if the publisher hadn’t turned around and pulled it off bookstore shelves. But when I read all the off-shoot accounts of the state of book packaging today, I find myself sympathizing at least a tiny bit, as Rachel Pine seems to, with the young author. Not enough to defend her, perhaps, or to excuse what happened, but honestly—what a confusing business this has become.

I recall an old episode of The Avengers on TV, in which a publisher created a computer to crank out formula novels, then passed them off as having been written by a human being. I thought for sure that was pure fantasy until I began reading about this plagiarism case. Kaavya Viswanathan’s name is on the book’s copyright page, but according to what I’ve read so is Alloy Entertainment’s. So who is to blame? How did this happen?

While discussing it with my husband earlier today I remembered how my love of the written word manifested itself as a teenager. There were authors who could’ve written anything and I would’ve soaked up their words like gravy. Did I internalize what they said? You betcha. During those years my mind was a sponge, and I fell in love with turns of phrase, ways of using language. I recall teachers marking up my papers when I unconsciously used English spellings rather than American for words like “colour” and “favourite” because so many of my favorite authors at the time were British. (In those days the US printings of their books weren’t edited for such things as they are today.)

I don’t remember now whether it was Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave or The Hollow Hills that I first read as a hardcover from the library, then picked up as a paperback and read it again. At the end of the paperback I found a misprint of a few paragraphs, where lines were interchanged and some were left out. I marked up corrections in the margin without referring to the hardcover. A few months later I went back and checked the hardcover. I’d remembered the precise wording. I had apparently memorized those passages my first time through.

I couldn’t do that today. Today I don’t even know which of the two books it happened with. I seem to recall it had a yellowish cover and that makes me think it had to be The Hollow Hills. My brain has aged enough that such a feat would be unlikely though I may be every bit as impressionable today. It would take at least two or three readings for me to memorize even a favorite author’s wording now. I also like to think I’d realize I was remembering another author’s words, not making up my own. But who’s to know? No one offered me half a million dollars to write a book at seventeen. While that could seem to the bystander to be a lot like winning the lottery, I suspect to many writers it would mean that much more pressure to produce a product.

In Viswanathan’s words, according to Rachel Pine:

“I wasn’t aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty’s words.” She has also apologized, repeatedly, profusely, and to my ears, genuinely. But she also seems at a loss to explain just what happened. In an interview with the New York Times, she said, “I really thought the words were my own; I guess it’s just been in my head,” she added. “I feel as confused as anyone about it, because it happened so many times.”

When I heard about Viswanathan’s novel I thought to myself it was obvious her editor had never read the Megan McCafferty novels she’s said to have lifted from, or surely this would’ve been noticed early on. Then I read this in the New York Times piece:

The relationships between Alloy and the publishers are so intertwined that the same editor, Claudia Gabel, is thanked on the acknowledgments pages of both Ms. McCafferty’s books and Ms. Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.”

So what happened there? And I wonder, are the days of the lone writer crafting a book from his or her heart gone?

In an off-shoot article, John Barlow paints a portrait of his own book packaging nightmare, and leaves me wondering why so many people need to be involved in writing a story, only to leave the author hanging out on a limb, alone, held responsible for the end product—which perhaps isn’t even really his creation. I think books are better when not written by committee. Look what that’s done to television—hundreds of channels and, more often than not, nothing new worth watching.

In this case it appears the author is to blame, and perhaps others are to blame as well. In the end it’s all about honesty, not passing off another’s work as your own. I’m relieved there’s so much outcry, because I worry these days about how accepting we are of dishonesty and half truths, and how eager our leaders are to repeat untruths until (they hope) we come to believe them as true. But it’s also important to me, in this world where we seem to have to cast blame, that the right party or parties be named. I suspect the author will take the brunt of this, while the business entities involved will continue to do business as usual.

Introverts tend not to be as outwardly expressive, or to let others deep into our worlds as readily as extroverts. We’re not bubbly, cheery people for the most part. We tend to ponder. We enjoy time alone and many of us don’t like noise or interruptions. Introversion is a natural personality trait, and though introverts are probably in the minority, there’s nothing wrong with being so. We don’t dislike people, but people are sometimes difficult for us to be with. I think this has a lot to do with energy exchange and personal boundaries. It doesn’t mean anyone’s done anything wrong. It usually means we have different styles of interacting. Different people respect varying personal thresholds.

Is either an introvert or an extrovert better than the other? Of course not, and a world of all one or the other wouldn’t work for me. I see this as a yin/yang kind of thing. I hesitate even to group people into broad classifications like this. Each person is unique, a blend of many elements, but most of us lean one way or the other toward extroversion or introversion, some more so, and I think it’s the “more so” people where introversion is concerned who wind up with others trying to change them, and feeling misunderstood.

As a quiet person, I’ve sometimes been misperceived as shy, depressed, weak, or negative. I may not always look happy, and I don’t think quickly on my feet, but I have a vivid internal life, an ability to focus, thrive on down time, and think complex problems through. I don’t like attention focused on me, and I don’t like crowds. I work best in the background. I’m better at writing than speaking. I keep a tiny, close circle of friends.

When I was young the world seemed to tell me there was something wrong with being an introvert on this planet, so for a while I tried to change who I was. Experience has taught me that short bursts of such adaptation are fine, when they fill a purpose or need. But whenever I’ve tried to force a permanent personality change in myself I’ve wound up exhausted, with a constant feeling of not measuring up. I prefer to be true to myself.

I may read and write about a lot of serious topics, but to me that’s not being negative. I wouldn’t feel honest ignoring the negative side of life, and I don’t think a one-sided view is healthy or allows for solving the very real problems in the world. When I write about serious subjects it’s likely I’m in a positive frame of mind. It’s a sign I’m optimistic that something can be done if only more people would educate themselves and voice their opinions in the right places, if they would think through how they vote, how they spend, and what in the world they support. When it’s a serious personal subject, I focus there because I think all parts of one’s life should be examined and acknowledged, there should be awareness. I try to keep a balance, to see the clouds as well as their silver lining. I don’t think being happy means I should never be serious, that I should ignore the clouds and focus only on sunshine. I can, of course—I’m often silly in fact. Others rarely see my silly side, but my husband, close friends, and pets do.

Maybe seriousness isn’t all about being introverted or extroverted. Other factors come into play in the totality of who anyone is. I like to explore the variety of cultural, social, political, familial, spiritual, historical, geographical, and ethnic backgrounds people come from. But perhaps the most noticeable and meaningful categorization I’ve found (after gender) among people, in a social or work setting, even when I look at cheerfulness versus seriousness, is that of introverts and extroverts. I’m an introvert, and sometimes I need to convince others and myself that that’s not such a bad thing.

If you’re an introvert who’s felt guilty about being one, or if you’re an extrovert with introverted friends, children, family, or coworkers and you want to understand them better—especially if you know an introverted child or teen—I recommend reading The Introvert Advantage, by Marti Olsen Laney, Psy.D. I wish I’d read it much sooner. I wish it had been required reading as soon as I could comprehend it. The author is a psychologist and an introvert herself, so she knows our type from the inside out. I’ve read this book more than once and keep it on hand as a reference tool for its helpful checklists and tips on how to live as an introvert in an extroverted world.

Why? I fear it has more to do with intolerance than anything else. Not just intolerance for religion as a whole, or an individual’s intolerance for one or another specific religion or group of religions. This is bigger—intolerance within the leadership and membership of large, established religions—intolerance for all others. I see wider and wider gaps between religions, lack of communication and cooperation, lack of compromise in politics. I find this development increasingly disturbing. Secularism isn’t just vanishing in Iraq. It’s vanishing here at home and in the world at large.

It’s more common these days for a single religion to call all others (including no religion) evil, to condemn all others outright. It’s more common today for a state religion to dominate government to the extent that some form of religion becomes the law.

If I’m wrong, if intolerance isn’t all that common among spiritual and religious people as a whole, then we’re hearing a lot of extreme voices—or a few loud ones—and not much from more tolerant religious folks at all. I wonder why this is, and it worries me. Don’t most mainstream religions still teach some form of tolerance? Have the extremists won all the other religious people over? Why aren’t all religious people speaking out more on the side of tolerance—not just tolerance for their own faiths, but tolerance in general? If they are, why aren’t they being heard? What is behind the lack of tolerance we find so rampant today in the news? Are people more worried their children will follow other faiths than they are worried their children will be forced to follow theirs?

Religion today, at least the religion we hear about most in the news, seems to be led by power brokers, people more interested in gaining followers and keeping them, and even in controlling governments, by any means possible—often through emotion, primarily fear and hatred—than they are interested in anything else. Where’s the quiet work toward spiritual growth? Where’s the charity? Where’s the worship? The humility? Must a religion use fear to gain followers? Force? Domination? That’s what many religious leaders in the world today appear to teach. If extremists are so political and so vocal, perhaps it’s time for the mellower side of religion to speak up in response.

Where will it end? What’s the answer? My greatest fear about this is that the world has entered a new dark age. I fear a future in which my generation’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren will live as the Europeans of old did, who scrambled to act the faithful Protestants under one king and good Catholics under the next, or have their beliefs vanish like those of the various pagan cultures buried in obscurity since missionaries first traveled the globe.

That kind of scurrying to appease the dominant religious leaders isn’t religion or faith. That’s abuse and survival.
–

Some links to related articles:

On Afghani Christian convert:

Afghan Christian asks for asylum

Mood hardens against Afghan convert

Afghan Christian Convert May Avoid Prosecution

Judge Defends Court In Afghan Christian Convert Case

CAIR Calls for Release of Afghan Christian; Islamic Civil Rights Group Says Conversion a Personal, Not State Matter

On Missouri resolution to establish Christianity as a state religion:

Reject state religion

Proposed House resolution on religion irks some here

Missouri House resolution on religion, prayer and government

I started my website back in 2000, when Shadows Fall was first published, for the same reason most writers do, to promote my work. Four years later I started this blog as a way to provide up-to-date content on my website and let visitors know what I was working on—basically as a way to keep the website from stagnating when too much time passed between novels. Little did I know at the time that the blog would engage so much of my attention.

The immediacy of this format holds a certain attraction. Type, click a button, and what you’ve written is published. But that has its drawbacks. As easy as email, which carries its own risks, a blog can suck you out into public view in a way that’s scary and in some ways deceiving. It’s easy to forget you’re putting yourself “out there” to the degree we do online. After all, I’m seated here alone at my home computer as I type this into a little window on my screen. It doesn’t feel public at all, at the time I write.

I tend to be more reticent when I’m face to face with people. As a private person—in fact an introvert—I find the public aspect of blogging conflicts with those personal, internal privacy constraints. The degree of narcisim that comes into play in me when I engage in this blog or others startles me, especially after the fact, if I go back and read what I’ve said. I’ve always kept a journal, so I grew accustomed, years ago, to exploring and sorting out my thoughts by writing them down. But that used to be strictly private. Anything that might be published went through heavy editing and self-censoring. It had time to simmer, to boil down, before it left my hands and confronted other readers. Even then, I sometimes felt overexposed when submitting work. I’ve come to realize this mental exploration through words can come across in blogging and commenting as total self-absorption. At least that’s how I see it. I find myself talking about me, me, me, in a way I rarely do in real life, and then only with a select few people. I’m not sure I like doing this online. It’s a little too much of me, if you ask me.

Maybe blogging and commenting is too easy, too instant, too uninhibited—and far too permanent once it’s out there. Effective, judicious communication requires more time, more thought, more self-editing than this. I feel a need to take a step back. I’m not this spontaneous a person.

Then again, maybe getting me out of my native reticence is a good thing. The business end of writing requires that one put oneself out in the world in a way that’s uncomfortable to many of us who tend to be introverts. Writing is the form of communication we’re most comfortable with, so blog as conversation is a handy tool for us to use.

There’s a teaching attributed sometimes to Sufism, and other times to Socrates as the Triple Filter Test. It states that one shouldn’t speak until one’s words have passed through three gates or filters: truth, necessity, and kindness. Still, the questions linger in my mind, especially recently. So much of the rest of my life draws me, calls to me. I find I’m leaving the blog sit for long periods of time. I’m building dreams in the physical world that I want to pour my energy and time into.

Is all this blogging I do really necessary? Does it serve a purpose—the right purpose? If it’s all just so much babble about me or my life or my opinions, why do it at all? And what about my comments elsewhere? I’m a passionate, opinionated person. I’m an impulsive, temperamental commenter. I flare up over news or politics. I say things on the spur of the moment that I may later regret, because I didn’t think things through, or I wrote out of context to the original post, or I reacted and blurted out my first thought rather than responding from my core. Maybe I erred, or changed my mind. I’m not afraid to admit when I do that, but a comment made on a blog I visit may be around for a long time, while I may forget where it was. I have gone back and edited my posts on my blog at times, sometimes deleted them altogether. But, just as with emails, when we don’t know who they may be forwarded to, we lose control of comments.

Now this is not to say I intend to give up blogging—or commenting. I don’t. But recently I want to give all this more thought, take it a little slower. Is my attitude about this suddenly too furtive, too cautious? Am I dithering?

Sometimes I wonder if the next step beyond blogging is for the human race to become more telepathic. Here in the blogosphere we sometimes share our thoughts almost as soon as we think them. They’re not just first draft writing, sometimes they’re first draft thoughts. They spring newborn onto the screen, brain to fingers to blogosphere. Telepathy sometimes seems like the next logical step. If we need to be concerned with those three gates or filters when speaking and writing, perhaps blogging will teach us to engage them when thinking as well, to govern our thoughts, preparing us to wise up before we jump that communicative gap. Or is it possible that our thoughts already carry far more power—or distance—than we realize? Who knows?

So I wonder, why do other people blog, and how do you feel about it?
Have your reasons for doing it changed since you began?
Have you written posts or comments you regretted?
Does blogging accomplish a purpose for you? If so, what?