Mentalechoes

It’s a saturday afternoon and I was just about to go outside, but as is usual for Amsterdam at this time of year (which is to say all of the year) it’s raining. Since I ride a push bike as transport, and I really don’t look good wearing that just-got-out-of-the-shower look, I’ve had a bit of time to sit around and browse blogs, which is a new favourite pastime of mine just recently. Normally when I’m looking at blogs, I just look at things I find at random. I don’t really search by topic or popularity on weblists, or anything like that. No, much like a party where you don’t know anyone, I just wander from blog to blog reading people and their take on life. One of these - the last one - really caught my interest. It’s a blog by a woman called Ann who writes like I do; about her life and her thoughts about life, and what’s on her mind that day. I read one she wrote called 100 Things About Me, which was - strangely enough - 100 things about her that she thinks about herself. As I was reading the list (this was after I had read a couple of other posts) I began to get a warm feeling for this person because I started to know things about her, personal things, like you do when you spend some time with somebody talking intimately. I also saw that there were similarities between the two of us, and at time I had to laugh when things on her list that were personal quirks that I had as well. By the end of her 100 Things post I had a very good personal feeling about Ann, and I really hope that she finds the happiness she is looking for.

The thing about blogs that I see now, is that even though these people are strangers who write them, through their own particular and peculiar way of thinking and sharing with us their thoughts, we begin to understand ourselves better. All of us share a common emotional bond through just being alive and living in the world. And the fabulous thing about blogs is, it allows us as individuals to share our individual emotional experiences. In this very act of sharing we show others, and come to understand for ourselves, that we are not alone, but that others out there feel and think like we do. Strangers show us that we are not so strange after all, and that if others feel the way we do, then maybe we aren’t so alone at all.

It’s a beautiful thing in this world to be able to feel like someone else understands us, but I think it’s an even more beautiful thing when someone else gives us the opportunity to understand ourselves better and make us feel good about who we are!

Thanks Ann.

Padwanna.