During my freshman year of college, while walking through the path in front of the Williams College Museum of Art, I invented a piece of personal doctrine. The principle I invented was small and easy to understand but with profound implications, just like a good computer program. It was that

I should never do anything I'd be ashamed to have appear in a personal journal on a public website.

Naturally, there are some obvious exceptions. For example, if a friend confides in me and I listen to his secrets, those do not go up on the web journal of my thought-experiment. Details of my sex life are also not the public's business. But the point was to give myself a tool for evaluating certain long-term consequences of my decisions as I decided them.

In particular, this got me into the habit of asking myself how my actions could be scrutinized. I didn't want to please everyone or get everyone to agree with me. What I wanted to do was avoid any situations where I might have to defend something I felt was indefensible.

As a result, I always wanted to find and reconcile small personal conflicts before they became big ones. I got into the habit of reflecting on my actions and trying to understand what motivated them. I'd take a devil's advocate position, pretending I was someone out to prove that Shimon was stupid or evil. Real Shimon and Devil Shimon would argue (politely) in my head. The goal was to be able to either honestly refute or honestly take responsiblity for any shortcoming Devil Shimon could find.

Did this prevent me from making any mistakes? Hardly. But it made me realize that I can make mistakes, even mistakes that hurt people or hurt me, and that it's OK. I can learn from them, and I can be careful and avoid them in the future. But the doctrine of honesty gave me a powerful tool for dealing with my mistakes: it enabled me to consider them scientifically.

If you have not been in a good writing workshop, you may not know the value of confronting your own mistakes scientifically. The reason is that by nature, human beings have a certain level of pride in and expectations for thier work. We are usually not conscious of our pride and expectations until they're injured or unmet, hence the popular truism you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

The problem with having pride and expectations is that you subconsciously support your pride, or your expectations. These concerns become hidden assumptions; the things you can't say. Well, at most crucial junctures in thinking, there is good sense to saying those things you can't say. In science, the major breakthroughs must not, by definition, fit into current paradigms. In therapy, the fears that a patient is unable to talk about are the most crippling.

Unsurprisingly, this scales to one's day-to-day life. Those actions you take that you're least inclined to examine, those motivations you're least inclined to explore for fear of what it might admit, are exactly your greatest opportunities to improve yourself as a human being. Just like those problems in a poem you bring to a workshop that you're most afraid will expose your lack of skill will in fact do that and show you, conspicuously, how to improve both your current poem and your overall ability.

Maybe that's why I blog— to keep myself honest, and to remind myself that I can make mistakes. In writing. Several times a day.