I know, I know: I just used the most-quoted/paraphrased line in the history of quoted/paraphrased lines as the title of this post. But it's late at night and I don't care right now.
I'm wondering why I even started this blog at all, what I hoped to accomplish with it. I guess what I wanted most was to have people reading my writing, but that didn't quite succeed to the extent I'd hoped, considering how few readers this blog has. I also wanted motivation to actually write, and a medium through which to explore creative new methods for writing-styles and topics. Considering that this is the first post I've done in four months, I wonder how effective it's been in that regard either.
This leads to the question of why anyone blogs at all, which I suppose is simply a variant of the question: why do we write at all?
I think it has a lot to do with the longing for community in the human heart, that we naturally desire to share our creations with others because it is a gift of self that, when returned, gives us a sense of fulfillment. We are social animals, but we are also the most lonely animals. We are constantly striving to find ways to bridge the gap between our own selves and the others who exist independently of us. There is a voice in our hearts that cries out for encounter with an "other".
And yet it is so easy to get wrapped up in ourselves and close ourselves off from our brothers and sisters. We need to learn how to break out of our isolation, to pierce the dome of the petty realities that we make for ourselves and encounter someone who loves us. We all desire this, even when we fail to realize it and when the desire manifests itself simply as loneliness and misery.
We blog in response to this desire. We hope that these words which we send out into the world-wide-web will be read by someone who will love them and, by loving our creation, love us in some fashion.
Call me sentimental, call me over-poetic, but I sincerely believe we blog because we want to be loved.
