Saturday, January 3, 2009

What to Expect

In asking what to expect, an author implicitly asks what is expected of you, the reader. The answer is simply that I hope for your patience and good will. I don’t expect any particular level of education. This is not a scholarly endeavor, and I do believe that any person capable of reason will have no problem following what we’ll cover.

I realize that so much of our lives these days are bombarded with information, most of which is just so much noise and wears on us, and even conditions us to some extent. Others have written about the supposed dumbing down of our culture due to the explosion of media outlets, particularly online and via mobile devices, that predispose us to prefer short bursts of information and that even contribute to forms of attention deficit disorder. So I know that writing in the manner of this book, I am gambling losing people—we will consider things of weight and importance that can’t be sufficiently dealt with in quips and talking points. That is where my hope for your patience and good will comes in.

At the same time, I suspect the supposed dumbing down is more reactionary talk than it is reality. We humans don’t change our natures so quickly. We retain the capability to stop and think seriously about things. We might get out of practice, and perhaps some have more of a knack than others, but I believe that if we try to put our minds to it, we’ll find it comes easier than we might have thought.

What I hope to write about are things that we all give at least passing thought to as we go throughout our lives. They are fundamental to the human condition, and we cannot avoid them, though we can ignore them or be distracted from them. I don’t think I have any special ability or deep intellect. For me, writing is more like thinking out loud, and reading is like having a window into the minds of others, to share their thoughts and touch their minds, thinking about things I’d not thought about before or in different ways than I’d thought of them.

So I hope that my thinking out loud will, if nothing else, help others to stop and perhaps think about things they’ve been distracted from, not things they can’t or don’t want to think about. Or maybe, if nothing else, these pages will simply show you a slightly different light on things you’ve spent much time reflecting on. In any case, I thank you for your time and for settling down with me to think on them.