Introducing Culture Thursday

    

"The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say."
~F. Scott Fitzgerald~

After some thought, I have decided to move up to every day posting!  This is quite a commitment given my workload at this time, but I feel that it is do-able with a little forethought and commitment.  I will be using my Tuesday and Thursday posts to open my information mine to you, dear reader.  I will post only the absolute best finds that I have encountered in my search for truth, culture, and knowledge.  Today I want to share with you the site of a philosopher named Ravi Zacharias.  Dr. Zacharias is in my mind one of the most lucid and eloquent reasoners alive today.  He speaks from a classically trained philosophic viewpoint, and comes to some startling conclusions about the trends of culture and where we are going as a people.  His site has made available for free a massive archive covering a plethora of relevant cultural topic.  I have never heard arguments stated so logically, so eloquently, in all of my searching.  check him out!

The Perfect Now

As you might have noted, there was no post for yesterday here on SqueezedFresh. No I haven’t given it up, in fact, I've been making some great online relationships, and just recently got included in the Living by Design blog carnival number 23! All of this has been great, so why skip the all important Monday? Well, I was out having adventures and misadventures on my motorcycle all day. Long story made short, I rode over 200 miles, experienced both some of the most stressful and most relaxing road that I've yet rode on, and failed a motorcycle skills test. Although this may sound like a weak excuse for missing my post day, I really feel that I realized something important out there on the road. The pavement was perfect, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and I was HAPPY. I wasn’t reading about being happy, I wasn’t thinking about how to have happiness in my life, I wasn’t trying to lifehack anything. I was just enjoying the beautiful perfect NOW. I had another moment of perfect now yesterday evening. I was laying in the grass with Micalyn, and we were listening to the sounds of kids playing, watching clouds, and simply enjoying one another's presence. It was perfect. It didn’t need to be thought about, or analyzed. The perfect now can’t be looked at in that sense. Instead, you’ve just got to absorb it, soak it in. If any of you are like me, you have a mind that needs to make lists, analyze, and ponder. But sometimes in our pursuit of happiness we just need to stop all of that higher intellectual function and just BE. So today’s post is an encouragement to you. Leave your desk, skip the blog post, and go find your perfect now!

INTERACT: Breaking down the barrier beween the reader and the author

Well, its the end of my first month of consistent blogging. I must say that I am enjoying it quite a lot thus far. The ability to voice ideas and be read is extremely cathartic to me, and I have begun to anticipate each posting. One aspect of blogging that I have grown to really love is the immediate and instant contact with the reader. I find that this instant feedback refreshes me, and inspires me to write well. What I want to do with this post is get even more personal in my interaction with my readers. To that end, I have placed a twitter widget and a IM widget on FreshSqueezed. So please, feel free to drop me a line. Complain, comment, trade ideas and opinions, or just say hi. I would love to hear from you. This to me is one of the most exciting aspects of digital publishing. not only for ones voice to be heard, but to build relationships with ones readership. how exciting!

Vapid dialogues and Shallow Demagogues

“What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”

~William Shakespeare~

I don’t know about you, but I'm sick of hearing about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama’s racist, anti-Semitic minister. I know, I know, it’s important to the campaign. And it’s not that I'm sitting in Obama’s corner wringing my hands about his chances of winning the primary elections. I'm simply weary with the fact that we as a people haven’t moved beyond this. In my estimation, the dear Reverend isn’t even the main issue here. There have always been and always will be madding, divisive demagogues spewing forth their vitriol to the masses. The question that looms in my mind is, when the masses will stop listening? The real moral tragedy isn’t that the Reverend hates me because I'm white, or hates me because I'm middle class, or hates the Jews. The tragedy is that he has been able to make a lifelong career out of playing the race card and harming his own ethnic community through his attitude of learned and eternal victimhood. If he was one crazy, hateful man, it wouldn’t matter. But he’s not. He’s one hateful man that has 10,000 people in his congregation who evidently really enjoy listening to his drivel. THAT is a moral travesty. My suspicion is that, as senator Obama maintains, many in the congregation aren’t even listening to what he’s saying, perhaps the senator and many others are only there to enjoy the reality-TV-show like shock factor. Regardless of the reason, this huge following is very telling. Our popular culture seems to be more fixated on ideas and people that are shocking or entertaining than upon those that have substance. Our world has become so superficial that we have in many ways regressed into a pre-enlightenment dark age in which spectacle reigns supreme. We look with horror or morbid amusement at the savage glee surrounding witch hunts, but have we not become the same? Giving our attention, and often times support, to an idea or public figure merely because we are amused by the grotesque nature of them? In the last few decades, we’ve lost our moral anchoring, and drifted into hedonism. Now I fear that even hedonism has lost its allure, and something darker and uglier is beginning to hold us in its thrall. Are we becoming modern barbarians? Fixated on the spectacle of watching proverbial blood spill? Only time will tell. We desperately need a grassroots movement that champions ideas , entertainment , and people of substance. The greatest hope for this, I believe is in the free exchange of ideas we find here, on the web. So let’s stop having vapid conversations about hateful men, and move on the dialogues that have some substance!

The Imperative to Create

“True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.”

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery~

Last weekend, I went to a cabin retreat with some friends. It was just a time for everyone to relax and unwind (and contributed to the absence of posts this week). I considered working on a new post over the weekend, but I couldn't quit fiddling with my rekindled interest in ink sketching. Micalyn and I had bought art supplies to play with since the forecast called for rain, and I chose some ink and nibs. Initially when I sat down with my new supplies, I just doodled. As I continued to play around however, some great ideas began to flit back and forth in my mind. Then I really found my muse, and for the rest of the rainy day, that's what I worked on. In that moment I had an epiphany that has been burgeoning in my mind since I began writing for SqueezedFresh. I had forgotten the joy of creating. I had forgotten the catharsis of making something, instead of consuming something. We have become increasingly a culture of consumers instead of creators, and have forgotten the joy in producing something original and uniquely ours. In a prior post, I wrote about the potential power of the web to bring forth a remix culture, but I didn't really stress how important I feel it is to the human soul that this culture grow and spread. Throughout our past, individuals have always created. Many times this creativity was spurred by necessity. In this modern time, where our every need is met, what is the spark that will bring us back to the act of creation? I think that in this time of convenience and consumerism, we need desperately to rediscover the unique joy of being creators. We need to learn not only to enjoy works of art, music, and cinema, but to produce them. The tools are at our fingertips like never before. So let this be your wake up call. Get out there and cut, paste, draw, write, act, play, and create!

5 Blogs that will improve your life

Anyone who has ever read a book knows about the potential that a good read has to mold your philosophies and changed your perception of life. Well, a good blog can do the same thing. In fact, a blog arguably has more potential because of the increased intimacy between the blogger and their audience. Below you’ll find the five blogs that have enhanced my view on life in a very positive way. They have made me a better person, so I thought I’d share them with my readers.

Zen Habits- This is overall my absolute favorite blog. Leo is a fantastic blogger, and his consistently thoughtful and gracious writing has many times changed how I view the world. I couldn’t speak highly enough of this blog.

Life Remix- The recently launched Life Remix is a collection of the crème ala crème of personal development blogs. It’s a great blog for discovering other writers that you really enjoy.

Lifehacker- For all things digital, it doesn’t get any better. Lifehacker has multiple writers so it’s constantly updated and consistently useful.

Get Rich Slowly- Money isn’t what happiness is all about, and it much easier to accept that when your not struggling with debt. This blog will change how you think about money.

Lifedev- Productivity can be about one of two things. It can be about getting more done in your day, or it can by about getting your day done in less time. Whichever one of these scenarios fits you, you’ll find lots of ways to achieve it on Lifedev.

And lastly of course there’s squeezedfresh! I created this blog because I could never find anyone who was writing consistently on our ever shifting culture. So read on, and make friends with some good blogs.