A couple things I wanted to clip and save from online friends of mine:

From Brit Wolfson

Improvisation as a way of life. A philosophy. That is the idea we are after. Improvisation is the natural way of, well, nature, and I would posit life itself. The tree doesn’t wonder how the rain is going to come just as the lion doesn’t wonder where it will find its prey. Nature just lives. We too just live. We go about our days and do things and other things happen and nearly everyday we think, wow, that was different than I expected.

But many of us are afflicted with the idea of planning. Not only with the idea of planning but with the idea that this is a good thing, an important thing, an essential component of success and happiness. Let’s clear up some terminology. I understand that it takes action to get things done and that if you don’t know what you want, you will have a difficult time of getting there. I would simply say that the combination of dreaming and acting is a more effective combination than that of planning and acting.

From Brooke

I had an epiphany recently, one which left me with the unshakable desire to all but retreat from this online world. That means — hibernate this blog, remove all my personal contact info from all those social networks, stop ‘adding friends’ to anything, and - less gladly but quite necessarily - say a fond farewell to the many many cool people out there that I wouldn’t have had the privilege of knowing by any other means, but who are just too distant and too great in numbers to keep corresponding with.

I think about this from time to time myself, disbanding my online presence and just washing my hands of the whole thing. It may still happen some day in the future, but like Brit says, I’m not going to plan it out. I’ve been doing lots of - mostly small - things lately with no planning, preparation or any “reason” behind it. I’ve been discovering that it’s really disorienting to people around you to do and say things without having any particular reason or purpose behind it (that you’re aware of consciously anyway) and they often just sit there asking, “Why did you do that?” etc etc. But letting go of that type of thing makes you aware of how often you sit around and simply MAKE UP reasons for things and how often other people do it when they really don’t need to. Because what the hell is a reason behind something anyway? Where does it live? Is it even real?

There’s a pejorative term called “folk psychology” which - if I remember correctly is linked to something called eliminative materialism. I think it has something to do with how we make up models of what other people’s inner states must be in order to explain their actions. RD Laing’s book, “The Politics of Experience” is very much about all this as well, but I don’t have time to develop this train of thought right this second…