Lo, these many months ...

I still dig Benjamin Franklin. But I wonder if tracking the daily virtues of life is the right fit, overall for me right now. That’s all.

And with that Franklinean quest laid aside, again, for the third or fourth time, I see this sitting and waiting.

I built a little bit of a thingamajig, and I set it in the grass one day. And when I came back, in the new year, I thought, well, that’s a marvelous little thingamajig. But there are other thingamajigs and whigglydoos out and about.

For instance, there’s this idea in some philosophy and religion that there is No-Self, so puzzling over No-Self and, at the same time, trying to Personally Improve My Self are a touch, but not totally, at odds.

They are two truths—I am me, and I am not me/There is no me—and I think they’re simultaneously true, in different ways and different times.

When I was working on this Franklin stuff, I was excited about self-promotion and marketing and Becoming A Better Person. Now, I am still interested in becoming a better person, but I suspect it has something more to do, right now, with letting go, easing up, and observing patterns of behavior, thought and feeling.

When I started this Substack, I was in a season of self-improvement. But self-improvement always gives way, for me, to intuition and feeling things out. And somewhere along the way, the energy went in a new direction.

Franklin still warms his heart. I love his virtues. But Franklin is not my personality type, clearly, and my admiration for him has never veered into mimicry for long. I adore him, but he’s not really like me. To come down to my level, he’d have to give up on his grand ambitions, his motor to accomplish and achieve, his civic-mindedness, and his drive to create solutions and fix the world.

I don’t really want to fix the world. To paraphrase Ana from They Might Be Giants’ “Ana Ng” … “I don’t want to fix the world … I just want to fix my half.”

And my half, in Me-You, Self-Other, Inside-Outside, is … my inside.

So, I’m observing my insides. Gooey, right?

I will continue to post, eventually, here and here, because those are stable projects of exploration over time that will always call to me. The same goes for my podcast, which costs me $14 a month to broadcast to almost nobody. And I will report on my personal muddling here.

All of your support, in subscribing, commenting and paying, has always been appreciated.

Love, Me.

P.S. I’m me, and I like Benjamin Franklin’s virtues. They call to me. So, I may eventually return to that book, the old one, and the new one about his virtues, that we’ve been dancing through. But he fusses over things I don’t need to fuss about right now. I’ll be here … and I’ll be back … and, really, you and I, we’ll never be the same again, so I guess, in a way, I won’t.