Re-inventing myself

“Like the legend of the phoenix, all ends with beginnings” – Daft Punk

This is my first entry on the new soulcruzer site. I am not new to blogging. I’ve been in the game since 2004.

My most consistent trait as a blogger has been experimentation. If you’ve been a solid follower of this blog (or any of my others), then you’ll know every few years I blow the site up and completely redesign and re-invent what it is about and who I am in relationship to it. I’d like to say I am through with all of that and this is the last iteration of the blog, but knowing myself, as I do, I can hardly make that promise to you, nor to myself. All I can do is follow the flow and see where it takes me.

This iteration of the blog marks a return to my roots as a philosophical thinker and reflector in search of the good, the true, and the beautiful in life.

I feel compelled to emancipate my spirit and focus on the pure joy of living while maintaining, as Plato taught, a balance between my desires, my emotions, and my thoughts.

I am currently working my way back through Lin Yutang’s wonderful book, The Importance of living. He always reminds me of the joys of practicing philosophy with an Eastern mindset.

As he writes in The Importance of Living:

“…the Chinese philosopher’s view of life is essentially the poet’s view of life, and that in China, philosophy is married to poetry rather than to science as it is in the West.”

This philosophy is:

“characterised by: first, a gift for seeing life whole in art; secondly, a conscious return to simplicity in philosophy; and thirdly, an ideal of reasonable living. The end product is, strange to say, a worship of the poet, the peasant, and the vagabond.”

Something else I picked up from Lin Yutang is the idea of the “laughing philosopher” whose only function is “to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average business person does. “We moderns take life far too seriously and as a consequence, the world is full of troubles.” My present direction of travel very much has me aligned with the laughing philosopher.

My intent with the re-invention of this site, and therefore myself, is to move away from the abstract outlines of wisdom and move towards the art of living in a more visible, palpable and understandable way.

“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” – John Ruskin

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