Hello World (about this blog)

Why this blog?

Ok, so here’s the thing. I’ve contemplated starting a blog before. In fact, I have started one, and then gave up pretty quickly. I've never found an area that I wanted to settle on to blog about.  However, over the past year or so I've been doing a lot of processing, a large part of which has been on trying to understand myself better.  I had got to a point in my life where I became acutely aware of the amount of energy and effort I have put in all of my life to feel like I fitted in, or would be accepted, because for some reason I just felt different to the majority of people I spent time with.  During this process, my wife and I were taking a couple through a pre-marriage course, and one of these people was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome (now typically referred to as part ASD, see here).  During the course, as they explained some of the things they struggled with, I started to see a lot of similarities between their struggles, and mine.  As I've researched it more, and done lots of reading around it, it has helped me to understand a lot more about how I process information (see here for one example).  Getting an official diagnoses for Aspergers can be a long process with a multi-disciplinary team of health professionals, so I am not about to self-diagnose myself.  However, in realising the many similarities in the way I naturally process information, and those ways documented for Aspergers, it has been helping me to embrace the good parts of my mind, and be aware of the struggles it can also bring. 

Recently, Elon Musk hosted "Saturday Night Live", and moments after revealing he had Aspergers said "I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that's just how my brain works".  My aim on this blog is to say or post potentially strange things, but to also invite you in to the processing behind how I get to those things.

What can you expect?

Interconnected

One of the the first things to say about how I process information, and potentially the key thing, is that pretty much every piece of information I take in is connected with at least one other thing/area of information/reality/process, and often it is interconnected with multiple areas.  What this means is that even the simplest statement someone says to me, or I think of myself, often gets fired around my brain and I think about mutliple different meanings and implementations of it, and how that impacts multiple other areas of thought or areas of information.  Sometimes this is a speedy process, and can end up in all sorts of puns (many of which only seem to be appreciated by other like minded people), other times it can lead to days/weeks/months of deep thought and processing, new ideas and/or ways of seeing the world and my place in it.  

In order for you to understand the various topics I am likely to touch upon, it helps for you to know about the major aspects/dimensions of my life/mind which interplay with each other.  Sometimes they can reinforce one another, sometimes they can seemingly contradict each other and make the processing a real struggle.

These main areas are:

1. I am a Christian and I wholeheartedly believe that I am loved by God, that he "knitted me together in my mothers womb" (Psalm 139:13), and that he "has plans to prosper me and not to harm me".  With this comes the belief in a spiritual reality/dimension.
2. I am a scientist (I have a PhD in Physical Chemistry, and am a research scientist in industry currently) with many years of experiencing the incredible power of logical reasoning, maths, and probing the depths of this physical world/dimension with the scientific method.
3. Despite how my wife (and others) can perceive me sometimes, I am human, and I experience emotions.  Sometimes these emotions can feel like a separate dimension in and of themselves.

So, when I process information, I tend to think about it through all these three intricately interconnected dimensions of the world: spiritual, physical and emotional.  When 2 or 3 of them reinforce each other, it can be a pure joy, when there is seemingly a contradiction between 2 or 3 of them, it can feel like a really intense struggle in the mind.

My posts may be related to any aspects of any of those 3 dimensions.

Closing comments

So, my hope is that in bringing you along on my thought journeys, it will either encourage those of you who have similar joys/wrestles, or help others understand the joys/wrestles other people with a mind similar to mine may experience. 

I am not necessarily always writing with a voice of authority on a topic, but rather explaining a thought process, which may or may not get to a correct conclusion.  You may find some topics are of absolutely no interest to you; are just too abstract; or as Elon Musk put it, are just strange, so just don't bother reading them if they aren't of interest.  My hope is that even those articles may connect with other people who do enjoy them.

Lastly, although I am married to a fantastic designer, I am not myself one.  I may tinker with various technical aspects of this blog (the coding behind the scenes) for fun, but currently I am not planning to spend a lot of time on the design.  I hope this simple layout, with lots of thought going in to the content, gives people something interesting to engage with.

Welcome to the world of an incessant thinker and processor..."So it begins"...