Welcome to From out here.
First off a bit about me. I am someone who enjoys learning new concepts and ideas and combining them together to create new concepts and ideas to play with and learn from. My history isn’t a particularly exciting one. At twenty one I left home and travelled across the country to start my life and take responsibility for my own life. At that time I spent a lot of time alone, isolated by my own shyness and a depression the depth of which I didn’t recognise until I could look at it in hindsight.
Although this wasn’t the most productive time of my life in most areas it was the time that I came to know myself, I read extensively with an aim to broaden my mind and to escape the reality in which I found myself. I didn’t have a job, or money, or friends, and my family was a long way away from me. It was a horrible time for me on a day to day basis but I learned, I read Shakespeare for the first time, discovered philosophers and dreamers, I learned about politics and religions. All in all, looking back I am both immensely grateful for, and also regret of the path my life took. It shaped who I am for all the positives and negatives that that entails and to this day I am living with the effects of it on a daily basis.
What has stuck with me from this time is a sense of being an outsider. Though I have turned my life around and now have a support network of dear friends and family members I still have the feeling of being just outside of the circle, looking in. I realised early on that there is no “normal”, that everyone has their own distinct brand of crazy. I have an instinctual distrust of “obvious truths” no matter how obvious they appear to be and this extends to the people who believe that they know the truth. About anything really.
So who am I looking to attract to my site? People who think, preferably people who love reading as much as I do and like talking about the ideas they discover. I’d like to find the people like myself who don’t buy into any of the doctrines that we are expected to follow. I’m not saying that you can’t come here if you hold strong opinions but I’d ask you not to try to push them onto others. Debate is fine, proselytising for your religion (be it an actual religion or just a strongly held dogma from any field) is not. I want a place where all points of view can be welcome and live peacefully (which is a strange goal for one as cynical about human nature as me). A good rule of thumb: if your ideas are too serious to be laughed at then they probably won’t go over very well here.
As you can see the website is in its most rudimentary stages at present and I’ll be continuing to update and improve it as time goes by. My eventual goal is to have a monthly book club where one member suggests a title that has particularly moved/influenced them and the other can read it and discuss it in the club. Possible member book reviews/recommendations and even a book swap forum are planned future features as well as other ideas I haven’t had yet.
I do plan on eventually trying to make this site pay for it (at least) eventually so don’t accuse me of “selling out” if a few discrete advertisements crop up in the future. If I do go down that path I assure you that I will keep it discrete.
I wrote a poem once using the symbology of humanity as a large crowd around a huge bonfire, the further from the fire the less similar the people appear. I am on the outside of the great circle looking in, seeking friends in the shadows to whisper to each other about what we can see “From out here.”
Pat!