Answers to big questions are almost always found in small and benevolent movements.
They seldom come in thunderbolt revelations and almost never gift flawless enlightenment.
They may inspire but rarely are they able to sustain an unabated and life-long transformation.
Answers to our questions are going to be flawed by our interpretation because we are flawed in our constitution.
When I posed the question, "Why Blog?" the comments from everyone were just as subjective and individualized as each person is themselves.
Obviously, we blog because we like to write. Some aspire towards publication. Many have already achieved that honor, but we write here because of a desire to measure our worth against the crowd and gauge the impact of our efforts by their response.
We blog because we don't want to be alone, which is something that can happen whether you are surrounded by a bustling family, living in a frenetic city or town, or working in a vibrant office.
We blog because we have things we want to say and wonder if others might share in our perceptions.
We blog because we want to belong.
Soon, if we are paying attention at all, we realize that this is not a vapid exercise.
Is it narcissistic? Of course. But so is our daily preening. We put on makeup, shave our beards, iron our shirts, wear hats, pretty dresses, variegated ties, and classy shoes.
When we look to another and smile, we hope to receive one in return.
Saints and sinners alike have the sublimely self-indulgent characteristic of caring about themselves as well as about how they are regarded by others. It is called being human, and it is a noble calling.
There is an ineffable fabric of both kindred and disparate hearts that becomes embellished with deeper colors and unpredictably salient hues every time we step out from behind our cluttered lives and the deep tread of our personal inhibitions and apprehensions to write and to share our thoughts with people whose names and faces we may never know but whose hearts are often as present to us as our own.
It is a pure connection, this blind alliance. We are not distracted or disturbed by appearances, by political or sexual orientation, by race, creed or color; by economic or cultural classifications or by ability.
Yet we despair when we read that someone's dog has been hit by a car or another is longing for a peace she cannot find in an abusive home.
We cheer when strides are made in the life of a writer whom we know is struggling with depression and laugh in conspiring delight when one calls us all out into the unflinching light of clean parody.
It is not by accident that we are here or that we glance off one another's posts like stars caught in the pool of gravity. Nothing is random in the universe and certainly not in this microcosmic literary reflection.
We may have originally come here in an effort to understand ourselves and to find our own voices, but we soon learn that the only way we can truly accomplish that is by finding each other and listening to those voices.
And while ratings and popularity and Editorial Picks provide the occasional high-five towards our human endeavors, the nod most worthy is the one we get from those lives we have touched; the ones we have reached out to and supported; the ones we have rallied around; the ones we have commiserated or laughed with; the ones we have said goodbye to or welcomed back.
It doesn't matter whether two people read our post or two thousand. If we trust that whomever is brought to us is exactly the person or people we are supposed to touch that day, then we are already ahead of the philosophical curve.
We are employed by a firm quite apart from this terrestrial warehouse whose purpose I doubt we will ever fully comprehend while tethered to this mortal outpost.
If we can sustain that kind of faith as we write your soul to a better place, then we know why we are here.
In our thoughts, we are always alone. In our hearts, we never are.
So, in the end, we blog because we can. But we stay because we care.
