…for now.

I love you. I do not necessarily know you, at all or well; I love you, however impersonally.

Since Candlemas (aka Groundhog Day) I have been quiet in the world, though not silent or absent. It didn’t begin as anything to do with the world. I wanted to break the worst of my Facebook tracking compulsions, at least temporarily, to see if I could come back to it on healthier footing. So except for Twitter — where I turned for links to news once I realized how dependent on Facebook I’d become for that, and where heretofore unknown parts of the world dis-covered themselves to me — I kept silent for a month. And when I returned I mistook others’ shadows for my own and dropped low to the ground for the remainder of spring and now to Midsummer.

That’s over. I’m still working on the healthier footing (and basing myself here is part of that). But I return to making public records of some of my thoughts and flinging them into your feed.

Just as I do not necessarily know you, at all or well, you do not necessarily know me, at all or well or as well as you think. Some of what I write or share will be surprising or baffling or painful because you think it’s incoherent, or overstated, or incomplete, or otherwise wrong — and maybe you expected better.

Some of it is wrong. Some of it has to be. I just don’t know which of it, or how (though I have my suspicions about the parts that aren’t and some reasonably good awareness of where my ground is weak). No one owes me the time or patience required to help me sort that out, but I’m grateful whenever you do.

I offer you three considerations to take with you when you encounter my to-your-thinking errors, especially the surprises. One: however well you know me, over however long a time, consider that I am still him you knew. I don’t understand my present thinking or behavior as radically inconsistent with my past, rather only differing primarily to become (I hope) more coherent overall. If you ever thought me to any degree wise or honorable or well-intentioned, there is good reason to suppose that your reasons for doing so still hold now.

Two: what may be true with regard to the wisdom or honor or good-will of those whom you know well may also be true with regard to the same of those whom you don’t know. The surprises your acquaintances and intimates offer you may be the same offered you by strangers. Likewise the apparent folly, treachery or ill-will of strangers and familiar villains may at heart be the same as the other surprises.

Three: just as some of my thinking must be wrong, so must some of yours.

I do not say this to deny anyone’s folly or treachery or ill-will, nor to suggest that all treachery or ill-will can be diverted or broadened or allied. Disagreements regarding principle cannot be reconciled. I say this to argue for more and better arguments. They take time; they take patience. But the narrow hope that I sometimes trust for humanity depends on them. And I love you.