Improvement

This is my first real blog entry and I'm gonna try keep it short and sweet.

I've got a lot of ideas swirling around in my mental quagmire, interesting concepts and connections I've had impressed on me and that I've made from the material I immerse myself in. There probably won't be an overabundance of coherance, most of these thoughts are only partly fleshed out and I'm sure they're all laced with naivety. I'm also prone to waffling off on a tangent, so don't be surprised if my train of thought derails mid-way. In short, this could just end up being a whole bunch of bullshit.

But, since your still reading..

I get to spend a lot of my time thinking. One of the benefits of having a mundane job. A lot of my daily thought revolves around the theme of improvement. How can I make myself a better person? How can I have better, more satisfying interactions with others? Who can I look to learn from as a role model? And ultimately how can I help make my world a better place?

My current ideas of personal improvement hinge on finding better quality, more relevant information to draw better conclusions from. But it could mean many things as far as interpreting external influences to predict their effects. Before I get too carried away though, I thought that it's important to unravel my own internal influences, past experiences, prejudices and nuances which inadvertantly change my experience of the world. Having a thorough feedback mechanism to give an unbiased reflection of your own internal workings helps you better understand who you are and makes understanding the world around you more accurate and rewarding. I guess that's why we all need good friends and family, who will tell us honestly when we are oblivious to the ingrained cues that betray our own internal inefficiencies and shortcomings.

I suppose I mean that we should never take for granted that our opinions will mature as we learn, even if they're only refined, but especially if they are entirely reformed. The way we view our world today will invariably change as we do, and as we look back from tomorrow. The important issues we face today will become history. As we reflect on ourselves, the more constantly things impress upon us, the more fundamental these premises, the more it would appear that we have stumbled upon something of inherant, personal value. Something worth exploring and drawing strength from.

Combining this ability to recognize our character strengths with the desire to root out any weaknesses will inevitably lead us down the path towards personal improvement. Simply removing ourselves from our prejudices may even be as easy as recognizing them, understanding them and refusing to let them cloud our future judgement.

As we better understand ourselves we're also better positioned to then understand others. Our experiences will be vastly different, but by sharing our experiences and interpretations we collaborate our strengths, refuse to be at the mercy of our weaknesses and together explore the fundamentals of our lives to build better relationships, better communities and ultimately a better world. We need not get along all the time, but we should respect our differences and work together to improve things generally.

Intolerance and division has destroyed so much of what is good about humanity, especially in recent years and while our tendency to goodness, empathy, compassion and humanity will never be abandoned, its mechanisms have become more obscure and the frequency of these experiences seems to have declined. So much progress has been made in our human evolution. Now that we're surrounded with the technology to better forge our own "utopia, it seems improper to submit, to rest on our laurels, especially when there is still so much to accomplish. There is so much hope in our world, yet we are remain apathetic. There's definitely room for improvement.

I'll leave it at that.