Why Are Your Eyes Blue?

What do you fill your mind with before you go to sleep?

What about when you wake up, what kind of breakfast do you give your mind?

Do you think about what you give yourself to think about at night, in the morning, and during the day… and wonder why you’ve chosen to give that to your mind as a something to ponder, as food for thought?

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Do you pay as much attention to your mental diet as you do to your physical diet?

Is your mental dietary approach similar to your physical one?

Do you starve your mind to make it thin?

Do you deprive it of the things it craves because ‘it’s bad for you’?

I suppose at this point in this questioning conversation I should probably ask about your emotional diet too… but *steps away from that minefield…

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I’m not sure if I agree with that quote by Richard Rorty or not, and I’ll probably never reach a conclusion about it because it would require that I investigate his life and his work in depth, see that quote in context of the personal and professional, and…

well…

I’m not sure that I want to waste lifetime on that even if it might increase the quality of my lifetime… it will decrease the quantity of it (and I could be spending that lifetime on something else which may be less valuable or productive but might be more in keeping with my usual way of spending lifetime…

and…

the only reason I know he existed is because I read this article this morning (while sipping too strong coffee in an attempt to wake myself up):

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excerpt from –  Fourbythreemagazine: Too Many Values? Intolerance, Anti-Relativism and Richard Rorty by Ana Sandoiu

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To be honest I only read the intro, it was a very good intro (which did make me want to read more even though it was a filling meal in and of itself), caused a lot of sparks to light up in my synapses (or something like that), and…

I’m never going to read the whole essay due to it having too many words. If I didn’t read it all while I was interested in it, then I’m never going to do it even though it may be brilliant and I’m missing out on gaining knowledge…

sometimes I wonder – what’s the point of gaining knowledge?

and sometimes I don’t wonder that at all because it doesn’t need a point if it’s fun to do! And I do find gaining knowledge to be a fun activity… but I also have self-knowledge (which is a slightly different kind of gained knowledge) which informs me about how long any gained knowledge actually stays in my mind before it ends up…

like this:

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The amount of stuff I’ve learned which my mind has thrown out… I’ll never know the full extent of it because my mind is… a rather devious chap (yup, my mind is a chap, a cheaky chappie of the slippery kind)… and it refuses to do maths (even though once upon a time I was quite good at that substance… and then I wasn’t anymore).

Also for breakfast this morning I enjoyed a humorously and diplomatically constructed dismissal of a pop-philosopher by another philosopher who thinks he’s in a different league:

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excerpt from Stephen Law’s blog – So You Think I’m Like Alain de Botton

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I have to confess that I only clicked on the link to that article because… I don’t like Alain de Botton. I bought one of his books, tried to read it and even tried to watch his TV series on Happiness… it was vapid, imo (but I’m a mess so what do I know – or at least that is part of my inner dialogue and it’s also part of my outer dialogue when trying to avoid or evade conflict). I also once watched AdB bitch via tweet about his first world problems with air travel… and each whiny tweet was met in my mind with the question – Why isn’t he practising what he preaches? –  if he did then he’d be happy rather than a sharer and propagator via tweet of whiny moaning.

I have this vague suspicion that I asked him as much via tweet… it’s the sort of shit I would have done in my early days of social media participation… it’s the sort of shit I do quite often in my life as an INTP…

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I like to question things, people… and that has consequences which I don’t always accept gracefully or graciously, but at some point I do accept the fact that I’ve made life harder for myself by doing that.

I could have made things so much easier by being… less me.

And why be me? What’s so great about being me? Perhaps not-me is so much better!

I’ll never really know…

Unless I give it a go… as the whole positive thinking thing would probably say, but the problem with positive thinking is it bases a lot of its structure on the premise of negative thinking. Positive thinking glorifies in the notion that it’s special because it’s different, not the norm… which means it assumes the norm is negative. Does the positive thinking movement exist without its belief in negative thinking and in itself as the superhero who exists to fight the negative?

Besides I have given it a go, I have been a not-me and I didn’t like it. You know that saying about a tangled web… it’s kind of like that!

Mind you, trying out a not-me occasionally helped me to find myself, and the not-me turned out to actually be me… but that only works when I thought a fake self was a real self (yeah, human complicated knots et al which goes something like this….).

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It’s a weird experience being human… and interacting with other humans whose weird experiences with being human impact ours… sometimes strongly and sometimes lightly, just in passing…

these days it’s all getting hot under the collar and lashing out… like grapplehooks seeking something to cling to while everything falls to pieces…

maybe we should let it fall to pieces and then call in the jigsaw puzzle experts to piece it back together.

I like jigsaw puzzles… I’m doing an impossible one at the moment which is frustrating and intensely satisfying simultaneously…

I like to do puzzles at night, just before I go to sleep… maybe I’m hoping it will give my sleeping self incentive to solve things, food for the mind or whatever that mysterious inner stuff that goes on when we switch ourselves off is really called.

But I do wish they’d stop putting timers on things like puzzles… who thought that was a fun thing to do? And why do they keep doing it?

I wonder if they think timing things and putting timers on fun activities will protect them from whatever is chasing them…

I wonder why some eyes are blue?

What about you?