I got up at 5 a.m. and drove around for an hour to catch the sunrise and the mist and got some beautiful photos that I loved. I got some more in the barn, and still more of the donkeys’ eyes. I lost them all transmitting them to the computer. Boy do I hate that, as much as I hate losing chapters. But being a photographer has taught me a lot. There is always another beautiful day, another beautiful photo. Let it go, so I did. Ouch, though.

I was thinking about the blog and communications. An interesting subject for me, and a continuing and evolutionary process. I see the blog as a monologue, not a dialogue. My boundary works this way: I write about my life, but I do not want to be thinking about my life or discussing it all day, or arguing about it with anyone. I just don’t do that. I try to be open on the blog, and  I have been faithful to that, so I write about it when Rose gets sick, or I deal with fear, or I confront issues like my approach to health care. I take responsibility for my decisions. They might be right or wrong, and either way I will live with them.

I think it is natural for people, when they read about subjects like, to offer me advice – their experiences, they thoughts, what their friends and siblings and co-workers did. I got a ton of advice about Rose and her medications. I got another wave about my decision to leave the mainstream health care system. And how to deal with fear I know this is inevitable, and one of the great things about the Internet is that people can get help if they need it. I’ve often though to give unwanted advice to people myself. I have never known anyone to take it or seriously consider it. And I never ask for it, not online.

I remember reading once that advice is something that ought be given sparingly, as fools do not take it, and smart people do not need it. That’s a bit black and white for me, but I think there’s a lot of truth in it. I get hundreds of e-mails a day, and if I read all of this advice, let alone took it, the top of my head would probably come off.  If you open yourself up online, put yourself out there, then you have to build your own boundary around your work and your life. And one has to be open about that too. Corporations have all learned to use interactivity to pretend to care about what people think, while we all know they don’t. I do care what people think, but I am rarely looking for advice, and my life is neither an argument nor a referendum.

When you step out of conventional wisdom or mainstream thinking for better or worse, you will not be in sync with much of the world. I have come to see this as my natural place. The job of the writer is to uplift, challenge and sometimes provoke. Otherwise there’ s not much point in me.

My idea of self-determined life is to gather the information I need, consider it carefully, make my decisions and move on.  There is no end to the amount of advice available to people now, and if I listened to much of it, I wouldn’t be on the farm, wouldn’t be married to Maria, wouldn’t have four dogs and three donkeys, wouldn’t be a writer, wouldn’t live in upstate New York. I would be living very differently and much more safely and practically. The blog has been a continuing experiment and education for me. I think it works as a monologue, and I know the price of sharing one’s life is that other people want to talk about it. So this is not a lament – I love the blog and Facebook – but an explanation of my point of view. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time or mislead anybody. I do not believe I know what anybody but me ought to know, and I rarely know that.

I never tell other people what to do, never give advice when it is not requested, and only seek it from people I know and trust.