As I mentioned in my first post, I started this blog partly with the intent of overcoming my shyness. Not that there’s a high likelihood that anyone will read these entries, but the possibility is enough to put the element of social judgement into play. In this vein, I’ve also decided to do as little editing to these posts as possible. While I’ll choose a point or topic to cover for each post, once, figuratively speaking, I put pen to paper, I’ll try to write as freely as possible and refrain from revision.

Spontaneity has never been my strong suit, but while I used to consider it a quality that I, along with a subset of others, was simply born without, my perspective has changed. A number of books and articles on creativity and learning have convinced me that the impulses which form the basis of spontaneous action are naturally present in everyone. The problem is inhibition, which in my case, and probably not atypically, is due to the overbearing influence of the rational mind. I’ve therefore come to the conclusion that the key consists in the cessation of the continual stifling that the cogitating self perpetrates on the doing self. Dreams in particular have persuaded me that such a spontaneous side lies within me. There are times in my dreams when, in moments of strangely lucid awareness, I reflect on what the characters are saying and doing and can’t help but be surprised that they are figments of my imagination. The challenge is now to bring that side out in my waking state. Exercises like this seem to help. I’ve barely paused while writing this, which is a big improvement considering the excruciatingly halting tempo at which I wrote my academic essays. The five-page essay that many of my classmates churned out in a matter of hours immediately before the due date took me days to produce, and after the process I was so spent that I was terrified of losing the document. Of course, as I write that my mind blanks and no follow-up sentence presents itself. I’ll end for now.