Discovering What We Think by Writing

Have experienced blog fatigue this summer and not posted much.  Wasn't sure why i took up this blog in the first place.  It seemed like an interesting thing to explore.  Sure do enjoy reading the blogs of others.  My my, how the blog universe has changed these six years.  I did know at the beginning that writing is one way to discover and clarify what you believe and how you think.  This is backed up by something I read recently on my Kindle in a book titled Jacques Derrida by Nicholas Royle.  He says:

In the early essay 'Force and Signification' (1963), Derrida quotes the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61): 'My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think'

Max Lucado on Fear

Am reading Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear (Max Lucado)
- Highlight Loc. 268-73 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 10:35 PM

"Jesus doesn’t want you to live in a state of fear. Nor do you. You’ve never made statements like these: My phobias put such a spring in my step. I’d be a rotten parent were it not for my hypochondria. Thank God for my pessimism. I’ve been such a better person since I lost hope. My doctor says if I don’t begin fretting, I will lose my health. 

We’ve learned the high cost of fear."

Snip from Kindle from Marilynne Robinson from R. W. Emerson

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Marilynne Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 148-54 | Added on Sunday, June 06, 2010, 12:39 PM

Recently I read to a class of young writers a passage from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” in which he says, “In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time,—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly…. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” These words caused a certain perturbation. The self is no longer assumed to be a thing to be approached with optimism, or to be trusted to see anything truly. Emerson is describing the great paradox and privilege of human selfhood, a privilege foreclosed when the mind is trivialized or thought to be discredited. The clutch of certitudes that, together, trivialize and discredit are very much in need of being looked at again.
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Great Insights by Both Authors.  I underlined something that jumped out to me.