Reflection

I have an image of myself as an intel­lec­tual person, but I haven’t been very, recently. I read blogs by people like Nik and I feel some­what ashamed of my lack of engage­ment and ana­lysis with the world at the moment.

So what’s going on? For a few months, it was that I was very busy… and now I’ve given myself a ‘hol­i­day’. Some of that time, I’ve been read­ing polit­ical mater­ial, but mostly fluff. I’ve social­ised a lot. I haven’t watched as many films as usual or read as many art­icles because in my spare time I’ve been doing a busi­ness plan (mmm, cash flow analysis).

And then what I have seen – the Res­Fest stuff or the media launch of the fab­ulous Proof: The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes exhib­i­tion at ACMI – I haven’t ana­lysed here, partly because I feel I have just exper­i­enced them rather than enga­ging with them ana­lyt­ic­ally. I think this hap­pens to me a little in summer: I go into a sens­ory space that is more groun­ded in hedon­istic poly­morph­ous per­versity (and I don’t just mean phys­ical – I mean this lit­er­ally: aural pleas­ure, visual pleasure).

I also think that the online edi­tion of The Age makes it harder to read the sorts of art­icles I read when I’m read­ing the print edi­tion. In print, I tend to read bits of opin­ion and polit­ics and world news and enter­tain­ment that are less likely to be high­lighted on the main pages. Find­ing them all quickly online is hard, so I end up skim­ming. And I don’t sit and read the print paper as much as I used to. I think this means I don’t think about things as much as I did.

I think I want to return to a more reflect­ive way of being: spir­itu­ally, intel­lec­tu­ally. Sounds like a New Year’s Res­ol­u­tion just announced itself…