image by nullalux
I’m guessing this must seem pretty weird to a lot of people: I just love making up mottos, lists of “core values,” etc. I’ve done it since I was a kid. I can’t friggin help it. I used to do logos a lot too but as I got older I’ve tended to grow more at home in the world of words.
There wasn’t really anything wrong with “thinking alive,” my last description (at least not that I know of). I just had to move on to something else.
That’s the other thing I’m thinking people perceive as weird: I change my stuff a lot. I imagine there are branding “experts” out there who would advise that changing so frequently (or being consistent so infrequently) is bad. Well I don’t care…
In fact, now that I think about it, the more of an expert someone is — or the more sure someone is about something — the less I’m inclined to trust them. When I hear someone say, “I know this and the answer is xyz,” I start looking for ways to come up with a different answer. On the other hand though, genuine experts do have a tendency to know and say and think things that are more true than most.
But the conversations I love are the ones where everyone says, not “I know,” but “I’m thinking…” We’re all open, and we’re all in it to learn.
The world is in flux and our knowledge must flex to accord with it: it has to be muscular, not just static and skeletal; it has to breathe and grow and renew itself constantly.
When I talk about “thinking alive,” it has almost a religious meaning (an idea which I’m going to develop further in the next few days). It’s a deliberate reference to Ortega, Bergson, and Dewey specifically, along with the whole extended family of pragmatist and process philosophers.
But now that I’m getting more involved in social media and sort of have to approach things in a slightly more self-promotional way (or at least I need something to fill the description field in all my profiles), I need something with a little more handle on it.
“Writer and thinker without boundaries or permission” was what I finally settled on after a couple dozen unacceptable iterations.
As with “thinking alive,” “thinking without boundaries or permission” isn’t just something seemingly profound that I happened to stumble on, it’s really a pretty straightforward description of what I do (which, I admit, is not simply straightforward).
It describes not just my attitude about conventional expertise, rules, assumptions, norms, and limitations; it describes a whole system of values and practices I’ve cultivated. It’s a kind of discipline in itself: intellectual orienteering.
In turbulent times when we can’t trust the old road-signs anymore, experience finding one’s way with a compass is invaluable.
