Thinking Out Loud

What are you supposed to put in a blog anyway? I don’t know the answer to that. Is there a blogger’s etiquette that I should use when I am blogging? If there is and I ever violate it in some way please let me know.

I thoroughly enjoy reading other blogs that uses attractive backgrounds, artistic fonts, and carefully organized pictures that help the reader feel connected to the story that is being told. I’m afraid you will not see much of that in my blog.  You won’t see it very often because I suck at that sort of thing.  If you ever do see one of my posts with those types of things included will be because I asked Jenni to do it for me.

I like to think. Even as I was writing   “I like to think” I began to wonder if somebody asked “What do you mean “you like to think”?  Hmm. I have to think about how I would answer that.

For me the blog is a place for me to think out loud.  Sometimes I am in the middle of a serious personal struggle or grieving personal loss or experience sadness because a love one is pain but most of the time I’m just thinking about stuff.

I have to organize my thoughts before I can write them.  Knowing that there might be people reading besides myself means that I will have to review what I have written for clarity and cohesion. Whenever I skip the review process because I am in a hurry or too tired it will be pretty obvious to the reader when I was being lazy and skipped the review. The extra benefit I get from the review process is that gives me a chance to think about what I was thinking about even more. I told you I like to think. J

 When I am done organizing and clarifying I save my thoughts in the blog post.  . Now that my thoughts have been saved I can quit thinking about the things I was thinking about. But if at some point in the future I decide that I would like to ‘rethink’  those thoughts I know where my thoughts are and I can read over them and think about them.  This is starting to get a little confusing. I wish I could think of a way to make this whole thought a little clearer.

There is a danger to thinking out loud, especially if you write them down and make them available for reading by other people. When you are thinking quietly to yourself you do not have to explain every thought that you have. Neither are you in danger of offended yourself because the thought was misunderstood. If you do have to explain your own thoughts to yourself or find that you are frequently offended by your thoughts you might want to think about what that might mean.

When I am thinking out loud about things that I am passionate about and deeply committed to is when I am dangerous. When I try to express my most passionate thoughts I have a tendency to sound like I am lecturing or even preaching to the reader. Occasionally, at least I hope it does not happen frequently, I will offend someone because of the way I expressed myself.  After reading my post the reader may feel hurt or even angry because they are sure that I am in some way insulting their own beliefs or trying to convert them to my way of thinking.

I feel very bad when that happens. It’s probably why I have stopped blogging in the past and have been afraid to start again.  The last thing I would ever want to do is hurt someone’s feeling or insult them because their values and beliefs are not the same as mine.  If anyone by chance ever feels hurt or insulted in any way because of something that I have posted please consider this an apology in advance. I didn’t mean to offend. I was just thinking out loud.