![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Rumination
Nov. 28th, 2005 05:32 pm
Have you ever read your LiveJournal friends' list and felt like an incredibly stupid underachiever? Oh yes, this is my life every day.
On the one hand, I am very VERY grateful for having access to the thoughts of a lot of intelligent people, and who seem to like and respect my opinion well enough to share them with me. On the other hand, half the time my brain is screaming at me to 'shut the hell up until you know something' and any thought I might have seems silly and quite ill-formed by comparison.
The only way to be intelligent is to learn, which I am, every day. I'm also wondering if age might be a factor; most of the people I most admire have had several years on me to figure things out, but at 25 the whole "I'm still young" thing is losing potency as a valid excuse. :)
I'm not stupid; I know this quite well. I do know that my brain may have gotten a bit smoother since I've left college, though, and while I'm happy with the progress I've made in other areas (personally and spiritually, for instance), intellectually I feel like I've stalled for some time. This distresses me mildly.
Most of the people I talk to on a regular basis, particularly the ones who wax poetic the most in LiveJournal, seem to keep these ruminations off the table for discussion and thus I feel like I'm never quite getting past the polite small talk portion of the conversation. This isn't an accusatory statement; I'm pretty sure there's something about me that makes people pull back on that kind of talk, whether consciously or subconsciously. When there are folks who do speak to me about complex or involved subjects, it's almost always difficult to wade through; music theory or philosophy or even apologetics for Buddhism are a sort of mental tar that I get stuck in.
Maybe it's because I don't really talk about anything particularly deep here, and when I do it's a lot of stream-of-consciousness circular writing that ultimately goes nowhere. Maybe I'm too self-conscious about it; there are a whole lot of "I"s in any number of my journal posts, which leads me to think that there's a whole lot of ego-driven thinking. While this is certainly the place to think about myself, if anywhere, I'm wondering if maybe that has something to do with the way people perceive me and my subsequent inability to really 'get' involved subjects with any kind of facility.
What's worse, I'm not sure what can be done about it beyond what I've been doing; learning and expanding at my own pace. Perhaps I should really sit down to think about something that's on my mind instead of tossing half-formed thoughts here and seeing what sticks. I know I could certainly learn how to read better, and retain more on subjects I find interesting. For all of the books on Buddhism that I've read, pinpointing exactly what I find right or wrong about the Four Noble Truths is a slippery proposition at best. (The Four Noble Truths, by the way, is a story for another campfire.)
I'm thankful when people decide that I'm intelligent enough to get something they're talking about, even when I'm not at the moment. It challenges me and forces me to think in ways I haven't been used to for quite some time. It also exposes me to the tricky landscape of the thinking man's life.
Playing more chess might help this, too. :)
On the one hand, I am very VERY grateful for having access to the thoughts of a lot of intelligent people, and who seem to like and respect my opinion well enough to share them with me. On the other hand, half the time my brain is screaming at me to 'shut the hell up until you know something' and any thought I might have seems silly and quite ill-formed by comparison.
The only way to be intelligent is to learn, which I am, every day. I'm also wondering if age might be a factor; most of the people I most admire have had several years on me to figure things out, but at 25 the whole "I'm still young" thing is losing potency as a valid excuse. :)
I'm not stupid; I know this quite well. I do know that my brain may have gotten a bit smoother since I've left college, though, and while I'm happy with the progress I've made in other areas (personally and spiritually, for instance), intellectually I feel like I've stalled for some time. This distresses me mildly.
Most of the people I talk to on a regular basis, particularly the ones who wax poetic the most in LiveJournal, seem to keep these ruminations off the table for discussion and thus I feel like I'm never quite getting past the polite small talk portion of the conversation. This isn't an accusatory statement; I'm pretty sure there's something about me that makes people pull back on that kind of talk, whether consciously or subconsciously. When there are folks who do speak to me about complex or involved subjects, it's almost always difficult to wade through; music theory or philosophy or even apologetics for Buddhism are a sort of mental tar that I get stuck in.
Maybe it's because I don't really talk about anything particularly deep here, and when I do it's a lot of stream-of-consciousness circular writing that ultimately goes nowhere. Maybe I'm too self-conscious about it; there are a whole lot of "I"s in any number of my journal posts, which leads me to think that there's a whole lot of ego-driven thinking. While this is certainly the place to think about myself, if anywhere, I'm wondering if maybe that has something to do with the way people perceive me and my subsequent inability to really 'get' involved subjects with any kind of facility.
What's worse, I'm not sure what can be done about it beyond what I've been doing; learning and expanding at my own pace. Perhaps I should really sit down to think about something that's on my mind instead of tossing half-formed thoughts here and seeing what sticks. I know I could certainly learn how to read better, and retain more on subjects I find interesting. For all of the books on Buddhism that I've read, pinpointing exactly what I find right or wrong about the Four Noble Truths is a slippery proposition at best. (The Four Noble Truths, by the way, is a story for another campfire.)
I'm thankful when people decide that I'm intelligent enough to get something they're talking about, even when I'm not at the moment. It challenges me and forces me to think in ways I haven't been used to for quite some time. It also exposes me to the tricky landscape of the thinking man's life.
Playing more chess might help this, too. :)
