Life In The Middle

From my experience, it is becoming increasingly difficult to finish what I am saying, if what I am saying extends beyond a few seconds.  This is a combination of my long windedness and the short attention spans of us all.  There certainly is a lot going on in the world and our means of communication has tended towards instant and short.  We also tend to fill all the "space in-between" or down time with something, anything to capture our attention.  This has made real changes in conversation.  How deep can we get if we only have a few seconds with each other?  Not very. Knowing this, Midlanders must diligently practice the fine art of extreme listening.  Extreme listening really is nothing more than listening in a time of extremes and in the midst of more and more extremists.  This kind of listening means sustaining ourselves mentally and following along while subduing the impulse to interrupt the speaker.  Domineering people will interrupt ...

Living in this world of extremes like we all do, I now find it necessary to write about how I have been able to comfortably settle somewhere in the middle, on just about everything.  With this initial post, I want to lay some framework of where I hope to go with this body of work.  For the most part, I will pick topics of conversation, a word or a few words, and write about them from the middle perspective.  The extreme points of view have been considered, and many times the rabbit holes followed, until I pull myself out of the abyss of the extremes and fall back to my comfortable position in the middle.  There is comfort in the middle, it is OK to seek comfort, to be comfortable. My feelings are so strong in these regards, that one of my primary goals in life is simply to gently file down the extremists and their sharp, lonely points of view, and gently try to urge them back towards the comfortable middle.  Most of us don't want to stand out in our points of ...