Rambling But Not Quite Random Thoughts
Have you ever wondered at the things that have a power to change the way you look at things, and therefore the potential power to change your life?
There is some philosophical school of thought that decrees that EVERYTHING in our world of existence is a reflection of how and what we think. I don’t necessarily buy into that philosophy - at least not on such a grand scale. But I do believe that what we think and how we think influences our observations of life and the decisions we make based on those observations. I believe that we are not always aware of that influence, and that we have no way of knowing the full scope of that influence.
And here is “twist of fate in the making” - even if we were fully aware of the influence of our thoughts and had a complete understanding of the scope of that influence, there would be circumstances and events in our lives that would cause us to react and think in ways that we could not control.
I came across a blog post today - Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was Younger. The point was this: if you had the opportunity, what would the present you tell the younger you? The blog post was a short list of five “lessons learned in life” that the poster would have benefited from if they had been learned earlier in life rather than later.
There were a number of replies to the post, and one in particular caught my attention. The reply used the phrase, “If I’d have known then what I know now…”. I suspect that we have all played that game at one time or another - “I wonder how things would have been different if I’d only known?” It can be a harmless came of “what if’s”, but it also has the potential to be a self-berating game of blame that might not be all that beneficial at all.
Perhaps Bob Seger expressed a much better viewpoint in his song “Against The Wind” with the line - “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”. But then, I have always taken some kind of almost perverse pleasure in that song and fancied myself as the balladeer singing my life’s story - even unto this very day -
Well those drifters days are past me now
I’ve got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out
And now, hopefully, all of this rambling comes to a point. A few days back, I used the StumbleUpon service to promote a blog post here regarding a free Audio BrowserBook. I was amazed - over 100 unique Stumblers visited the blog post, but only one actually opened the BrowserBook.
Sometimes events happen in our lives that cause us to react and think in ways that we cannot (completely) control. For me, this was one of those events. I have been contemplating the meaning of this event and am processing my thoughts in order to figure out the direction this blog will take. For the present time, I believe that I will be posting recipes, and a few “rambling thought” posts like this one.
Will Dugan
