Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Can we all speak straightforwardly to each other?

The first step is to speak.  Next comes speaking to each other.  Which seems to be something we're often poor at.  Often we speak past each other, or around each other, or we just insult each other while pretending that whatever position we've settled down on is unbeatable.  And then there's being straightforward.

But there are important questions we need to answer which we cannot answer alone, and which no amount of subterfuge or avoidance or beating around the bush will remove.  Things need doing.

So this is a very good question.  And I'm not sure what the answer is.  But there's always hope.

What were you thinking?

The source for this post is my recent project of "spring cleaning" on my gmail account... since I hadn't used it in two years, a fair number of unread messages, mostly from listservs, had piled up.  When I merged in all the messages I received as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had 1,637 unread messages.

The most interesting part came when I went through my "drafts" folder.  Which is a snapshot of ideas I was in the middle of forming two years ago: