Oh dear. I have just discovered something that is apparently new to blogspot: Stats. When did they add stats? Or have I just been blissfully ignorant of them all this time?
I've read many a post from you other-kind-of-blog bloggers about your practice with stats: How many hits have I gotten? Who's reading my blog? Why was that post popular and that post wasn't? What search terms are people using to get to my blog? Kloncke wrote a great post about this, and even created StatDragons to illustrate the weekly ups and downs of feedback from blog hit statistics. I have always been grateful that I hadn't the same ability to check and check and check: How am I doing? What does everybody think of me?
Now I do.
So observing myself observing the numbers, learning features of the stats application, like being able to see the different countries from whence the hits have come (hey there, Estonia!); this seems fine. It's the Olympic-level jumping to conclusions, the interpretations, the stories being generated about what it all means about me that starts to feel potentially problematic.
So I'll try to balance this shocking new option for self-obsession with a morsel from Pema Chodron's No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva, in which she combs through and comments upon each line of Shantideva's Way of the Bodhisattva, a text written in the eighth century, and no less relevant this very minute.
6.93
Children can't help crying when
Their sand castles come crumbling down.
Our minds are so like them
When praise and reputation start to fail.
"We invest so much energy into getting people to admire us, but our reputations, like everything else, are as impermanent as sand castles, and attachment to them causes so much unnecessary pain.
There's a Charlie Brown cartoon that shows Lucy building an elaborate sand castle, saying proudly, "And a thousand years from now, people will see what I did here today and be totally amazed." It's this nonsensical attitude that Shantideva addresses here.
Better to regard yourself as a character in a play. You can take the part of a person who's famous or admired, without taking this identity too seriously. If praise and reputation are as fragile as sand castles, it's realistic to not be disturbed when they pass away with the changing tides. Then you can build a magnificent sand castle, covered with beautiful shells and stones. You can even get people to help you and enjoy it thoroughly, and when the waves come in, out it goes."
3 comments:
you know I look at those stats sometimes and watch my little self. But my daughter showed me the fun part of the stat page and that's what people search to arrive at your blog.
Some of the searches that brought people to my blog were: "neural cowpaths", "shiny grey cement zen driveway photos", "zen confections" & "comfort soup"
That is a great way to think about the process - watching my little self. They are fun, too. I have not yet had any odd search terms that connected people to the blog. But I am not surprised that "zen confections" led someone to your blog! Thanks!
Oh... I have been searching searching for that Stat Dragon! Saw it first time on the Bearing Witness Blog where they talked about that "little self" (thanks, ZDS!). My stats become such an obsession that I'm forcing myself to take a few days off and live with the anguish of watching the stats plummet. Dukkha Exposure Therapy, right!?
Like ZDS, I enjoy seeing the search engine terms that brought people to the blog. My favourite recent one: "Is ox herding a profession?" Well, er... YES!
Of course, lately it's all been sex and sin that bring the flock home... ;-)
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