Last night I had a dream, a lovely dream. So today I’m thinking about what to do, where to go, who to be, why to be. Thinking that Dog Island can be about anything, but really, I am on my own life mission and not only a Dog Island missionary, but a human missionary, on a mission of love, of creation, of exploration. The thing about the internet, about a website, is that each site has a predetermined purpose, a preset reason for existence, and being undefined for a day, or a moment, or a blog post, is it the same as trying a new restaurant one day, or going on vacation one day, or wearing different clothes one day?
Am I as a person as narrowly defined as a website? No I am not. So what happens when my identity defines a website, is the cause for a website’s existence? Well, what happens is that the website starts to define my identity. At first this is not the case. At first, the website is created in order to present the most presentable part of my life, of my person. The goal is to find the most wide portion of my life, but no matter how wide that portion is, it’s still a portion, it’s still narrow in comparison to everything that exists in my life, in my person.
Soo… where does that leave me? Does that mean we should not attempt to present ourselves to the world? Does the fact that presenting ourselves to the world limits who we are? Well, only if we find identity and purpose solely in the medium of the presentation. Isn’t a conversation with someone I meet on a train platform also just a presentation of myself? However I am dressed, however my hair cut is, whatever my facial expressions, what mood I am in and words I say or don’t say, that is the sum of my presentation to that particular otherwise-stranger, and in that person’s mind, in that person’s experience, that is the sum of me. To that person, I am the sum of my presentation.
Should I and that person meet again, I will be the sum of both my presentations, at which point the initial assumptions become tailored to factor in the 2nd encounter.
And then a third time, and a fourth time, and technically, each time I could be presenting a particular mood of mine, or a different dress variation, and over the course of meetings that person would have experienced every side of me that I choose to present.
And it’s that choice of mine which is significant. Because if I chose to always vary, always show a new side, then my presentation would equal my whole. But that’s not what happens usually. Instead what we do is present the side we feel is best at first, and ease into other areas that we feel are best to follow, and sometimes we even stick with a certain part of ourselves that seem to cause a higher rate of positive reaction on the part of others.
So even in natural, person to person interactions, there is a refinement, an optimization of self-presentation, of user experience… so how is all this so different from being defined by a website?
Well, actually, the point is that it’s dreadfully similar, and exactly the same. Getting caught in being defined by a website is just as normal a human experience as getting caught in being defined by a group of friends you no longer relate to, or a political organization you no longer connect to, or a pastime/hobby you no longer enjoy.
So when I sit here and ask whether or not I am defined by my mission to bring Dog Island to the world, I am asking if this path is in sync with my deeper path of seeking enlightenment, of seeking deeper knowledge and understanding of the world, of the unseen, of the unknown, of the known and the knowable, and the unknown and the unknowable.
And the question I’ve learned to ask is the flip side: instead of ‘is this helping?’ I ask ‘is this preventing?’ because if it’s not preventing, it’s helping. Or at least, it CAN help. Dog Island’s purpose is about setting dogs free, about challenging the mindset that humans have in terms of the right-ness of “owning” dogs. Well, it’s just one of thousands of issues that face us, yet it is an issue that is core to perspective and awareness. How we view the freedom rights of other beings plays a major role in how we view the freedom rights of ourselves.
I can sum it up like this: freedom is a continuum. We exist on that continuum. The ends of that continuum are equidistant from each other and we are always in the dead center of each end. At one end is the least amount of freedom we can literally conceive of. At the other end is the most amount of freedom we can perceive.
To move towards the end of more freedom, we have to bring the low end higher. Keep in mind, we are always in the middle of the spectrum, so in order to have more freedom, those at the bottom must be brought up.
(The flip side of this is the people who seek to limit the freedom of those at the highest end of the spectrum. Those people who seek to limit others don’t realize that all they do is INCREASE their own lack of freedom when they reign in the freedom of other).
So dogs exist at a lower point in the freedom continuum than we do. By increasing their freedom, we increase our own. But the real purpose here, the self motivator, is the experience of more freedom for myself.
Captain’s Log: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 7:44 am
Year #32, Month #395, Week #1,717, Day #12,007
89th Corridor, West Dog Island
