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Thursday 16 June 2011

On logic

You know, working your way through the midden of your own psyche is a little bit like popping a champagne cork. There's no telling just quite how much is going to come out once you get the first line of defence out of the way. I've just had something of a revelatory moment, so this is going to be another one of those posts, filling your no doubt already heaving RSS readers. However, this is my blog so my question to anyone who's not interested or comfortable with it is, what are you doing here?

I studied logical philosophy at university, you know. But even that seems unable to save me from this little humdinger which I now realise dominates the majority of my social interactions, be they with friends or strangers. It goes:

I like it when that (e.g. email, message, card, free sausage, etc.) happens to me. So, extrapolating all of this available data, I can conclude that if I were to send/give/do that (e.g. email, message, card, free sausage) to someone else, they would hate it and resent my intrusion.

This frankly bewildering piece of thinking informs so many of my decisions that it's probably not even funny any more. The ironic thing is that as a child I would spend hours or days pondering, in a very Cartesian way I'll have you know, what it's like to be someone else. There's a good chance that this time may have been wasted. At the very least it could be said the conclusions I drew from it are perhaps faulty in some regards.

I imagine that, on more than one occasion, this piece of deductive reasoning has led people to think that I'm a little cold or stand-offish, whereas really I've been as giddy as a baby goat, wound up like a coiled spring in the corner waiting to boing into action if and when I'm beckoned to do so.

Of course, some people are more proactive than others and some people have more natural leadership skills. But it's that thing again: balance. My general tendency to ping between extremes and ignore the middle ground rarely serves me well. But it also makes me who I am and, when I look around even a damn fool deducer like me is able to see that who I am is a thoroughly worthwhile person.

I think that recently I've been getting a lot better at this. And I'm proud of that. I should be proud of that. Judging by the general response I've had I also reckon that I'm actually managing to find a reasonable level of keeping in touch without ever becoming too much of a chore. It may even be because of this series of blog posts that I'm finding this more possible - this place acts like an overflow of the bilge, fish heads and crazy that could otherwise make me a bit of a handful.

That's right, I'm making you all suffer so that I can maybe suffer a little less day by day. And I don't care. Hah!

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