Life being largely about the impact of the world on an individual.
Beginning with the flow of images, sounds, language, feelings, thoughts–various information via lived experience.
Received, filtered, organized, processed by the individual’s senses, body, mind, feelings via imagination, intelligence, and empathy.
Thereby generating important meanings, understandings, epiphanies including pattern recognition, meaning-making, personal understandings, and expression/sharing of same.
What might also be called the potential development of a sensibility with resulting integrity, values, and style.
In short, what comprises a fully-realized, autonomous individual.
The more developed and multitudinous the sensibility, the more interesting the person, the broader and richer the quality of experience and capacity for empathy, connectedness, expressiveness and creativity.
What is important, then, to any individual is obtaining and knowing the information that satisfies curiosity, that is wanted, needed, necessary, missing, missed in order to maintain ‘life-flow’, to ‘move forward’, to develop, and to grow.
Life’s information cannot be understood or expressed without language, thought, and feeling, and sometimes whatever missing experience.
Ultimately, throughout a day and life, whether one realizes it or not, one searches for the very information that is necessary to live more fully, freely, connectedly, and purposefully.
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An inspiration: The Information, a book by James Gleick.
“Sensibility” is one of those good old ‘lost, forgotten’ nineteenth century words, as in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
We all seem to be ‘looking for something’ at a given moment or at various stages of our lives. In the case of the latter, the missing pieces usually complete some understanding of self, others, or something we previously lacked. Often, we are just plain impelled or driven ‘blindly’ toward whatever unknown missing information or experiences that enable the potential to complete ourselves or to fulfill our destinies (and which we don’t know till we ‘get there’).
Something in all of this individual process that seeks freedom (of self or via something or someone else) and personally satisfying and fulfilling connection. In any case, it is the flow, the process, or ‘the journey’ as the old quote goes, that matters and reveals most.
And reflecting many of the entries that follow–it is in the knowing or consciousness of same that lies the meaning and purpose. Facilitated by words, thoughts, and feelings understood within and expressed to/shared with others. In that, finally, meaningful communication and the possibility of significant connection and relationships as well as whatever resultant positive personal and social actions and behaviors.
(the first blog entry of Tothineownselfbetrue.ca a mere 6 years ago. What a ride it hath been, expressing the passing feelings, thoughts, positions, ideas, visuals, and flotsam and jetsam of the passing daze–illuminations that might have otherwise dissolved and been forgotten. Montaigne’s essays inspired this continuing opus which has helped make myself known to myself and any others out there in cyberspace. I still enjoy writing, and this blog has remained as a largely prose and visual complement to my poetry.)
ps/ for anyone interested in the most basic life views stemming out of this philosophical entry, they continued to sprinkle in chronologically as the blog unfolded, especially in the first two years.