I have days when I resent blogging. I’ve been blogging now for almost four years, 3-4 posts every week, largely unpaid for my toils, sometimes uprooted by trolls. I wonder why I do it. Some days. I mean, why would any sane person expose their controversial brain farts, their innermost reflections and their ugliest fears to hundreds of thousands of strangers each month who are then free to pull apart such thoughts and farts among their friends and in their own heads? My family ask me this often in their unaffected, un-social-media’d way. But, then, they know I have always been a slightly unhinged personality.

But just as I’m about to throw in the towel, I get reminded of why I blog and why I’m so bloody blessed.

I blog because it allows me to help people. I don’t have dibs on myself. I’m largely a selfish, tight, hard-to-live-with, neurotic human. But I get the biggest kick out of helping other raw, open humans who, too, struggle at times just to get out of bed each day and go through the human experience. Nothing else matters. This is my dharma. And, as I say, just when I doubt myself – working as I do in my isolated, tight, selfish way – I’ll be reminded of said dharma. Someone will come up to me in the supermarket and tell me their story. Or I’ll hear about how a post I wrote connected two strangers on opposite sides of the world, who then helped each other out…generously, openly, lovingly.

This happened a year or so ago when a reader – Gordon – followed my advice to get a VA in a second-world country. Gordon was so touched by the VAs work and life story, he and his wife went to visit him in Thailand and helped him start up his own company, which enabled him to get married. Gordon and his wife went to the wedding, too. He shared this story with Jo and I. It made me weep at the time.

It happened again this week. SMACK BANG as I needed it. Reader Soula contacted me and asked if I’d mind writing to a young family member who was in hospital suffering from depression. She thought a note from me might cheer her up. She likes my blog and book.

I wrote to the relative. I checked first to see if she’d mind my sharing what I shared with her:

“I thought I’d just do a shout out to you and say I’m thinking about you. …I get low. Real low. I

There’s a long story behind how I came across this poem, written by a second grader*. Social media…it’s a curious thing. The poem, however, is just so perfect and a Thing to Reflect On.

So much depends on

busy people in cities

rammin’ on rickety computers

gettin’ really really tired.

I was walking through the city last week, between a few appointments in and around lunch hour, and I felt the weariness of the people upon which life depends. It most certainly is the ricketiness of the computers… and the buzzy hum of the air conditioning and the frenzied anger of the cars that tires us. It grates at us. And, when we tire, we ram even harder. Pushing and pressing. That’s what we do in cities; we falter, we try harder.

For an alien, or a kid, it must look like insanity. Who was it that said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Einstein? Yes, I think so.

When we get tired, we have to pull back and ask if we’re rammin’. If we’re being insane. I have to do it all the time. I ram so much that my whole body crunches forward and I do my neck in so that I can ram no more…then I’m forced to rest up a bit.

A few weeks ago a bunch of “followers” on Twitter arked up about the fact I don’t follow all the people who follow me. One tweet (twit?) said I was arrogant for not doing so. For keeping my “follows” so low.

image via beachbungalow8

Funnily, the brohaha was sparked by my tweet that shared how I seek more nourishing conversation from humanity…and engagement that gets down to the real heart of our vulnerability…the “ugly private stuff”. Mum and I had been talking about this during my visit back to Canberra. She got up to make some tea and so I tweeted where we’d got to.

By “ugly private stuff”, I mean the stuff about us that isn’t easy to gloss over. You know when you go home late, after a party, and catch yourself in the mirror and you look in your own eyes and you see yourself fully. No guises, no persona, no show. No empty conversations, no platitudes, no filling gaps. That’s what I want to see in others, to know about in others…

It takes a fair bit for me to get fired up about anything gossipy and nasty-ish online. Mostly I just treat it as a ball flying towards me…and that just passes me buy… and fizzles to a flaccid, uneventful plop somewhere in the distance behind me. It comes from years of working in media and learning that the best way to deal with nasty