On my walk this morning it hit me that this Steemit blog, as opposed to my "Stumbling Toward God" blog, my YouTube channel and FB posts, is not a purified, processed, refined and filtered version of my life and thoughts. Okay, so there is a little processing otherwise my blog would be some stream-of-consciousness babble which would make no sense. And there is a little filtering since I try to choose words and phrases which accurately describe the thoughts and emotions I wish to convey rather than blurting the first words that come to mind and seasoning them with profanity for impact.
At this point your are probably wishing that I had purified, processed, refined and filtered this post a bit more. You want me to get to the point so you can move on to something worthwhile. Well, this is actually part of my point. Using food as analogy, I enjoy the soft texture and delicate slightly sweet flavor of dinner rolls, made from highly refined flour. It does appeal to the senses, it is easier to chew than whole grain bread, but it misses almost all the benefits of the wheat from which it is made. The nutrition value is near zero (which is why "enriched" bread was popular in the 60's). It also lacks the variety of textures and flavors that one gets from multi-grain bread produced with a minimum of processing. This is true of many foods and true of life as well.
Sharing the realities of life, rather than sugar-coating all which we say, allows others to genuinely connect with who we are and what we are experiencing. I also believe that it prevents us from missing out on our own life. I realize that I am often just in some level of denial about what I am experiencing, because I want my life to be nice, clean, sweet and easy (like chewing on white bread). But do I really want that? I used to think so, but now I see that by avoiding the messiness, the rough edges that are a part of real life that I was missing out on real life. I was living a white bread dinner roll life rather than a mult-grain life. I was eating refined sugar rather than chewing on sugar cane.
The photo above is my breakfast this morning. The only "refining and purifying" which I did was to rinse them off and remove the inedible parts. And since I'm not filtering my thoughts I have to share that Sandy was walking very slowly this morning. And rather than have sympathy for her (since she is in her mid-80's in people years) I was getting aggravated at her because I wanted to get back here and write this post!
Now I'm done with the post and can start my real job, or maybe better described as one of my other real jobs.
Thank you for reading.