Eager

Something to consider...

On your planet you have an animal called a bear. It is a large animal, sometimes larger than you, and it is clever and has ingenuity , and it has a brain as large as ours. But the bear differs from you in one important way. It cannot preform the activity you cal imagining. It cannot make mental images of how reality might be. it cannot envision what you call the past what you call the future. This special ability of imagination is what has makes your species as great as it is. Nothing else. it is not your ape-nature, not your tool-using nature, not language or your violence or your caring for young or your social grouping. it is none of these things, which are all found in other animals. Your greatness lies in imagination.

The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen.

This is the gift or your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine.

This is a passage from the novel Sphere by Michael Chrichton. I read this when I was very young, and it has remained with me from that time.

Proem

There is an interesting concept of what the "self" is that I would like to share...

"Man is a bundle, or collection of different perception which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement..."

- David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature

I love this concept...I believe that it is a perfectly elegant description of the real self...meaning there is no definitive you...

We can change.

We are constantly changing, evolving, shaped by our experience, emotions, memories, shaped by the people around us, the things we witness and how we react...

I am currently experiencing a strange time in my life. The past year has been difficult for me. So many things have taken place that will change me...due to the complexity of all that has happened, I am unsure of whether or not I have caught up to it all...my "self" is caught in the grey area between reaction and evolution.

I have never not known myself until this year. I have known different selves, many different selves, but not this one, not yet.

It is not a bad thing, in fact, it has the flavor of optimistically awaiting the meeting of a pen-pal...

There are things that I do know about my self, however, that are vitally important to me...They are the core of who I have been in the past, and who I will be...

I am a creature of curiosity - I am fascinated by the world around me. I find the natural world to be an inspiration, the inherent beauty of mathematics and biology are particularly important to me. I love insects. I love looking at the stars...

I will come to this quite little corner of the internet that I can call my own in order to reflect on my evolving self, the world around me, and to share what I do love with those who might stumble across it.

So I lift my glass with you, computer dweller, and toast to the children of the information age trying to find themselves.