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lil  ·  3876 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ask Hubski: Hubski profiles... How could they be better?

This is a question for me totally because I'm always clicking profiles if I like a post or if someone new follows me. Why? Because we are interested in one another and I want to see you: to go from page to stage, so to speak.

The downside is that labels like gender, age, ethnicity, (whatever that is), education and all others let other people put us into face-to-face boxes which are reductionist and out of our control. -- that is, I can't control the associations that a reader might have if I write "meditator" -- some people will think "new-age flake" and others will think "centred, calm" or whatever.

That's my guess as to why so many profiles are blank. People think, "the community will find out about me by what I share/write. My ideas are more important than my labels."

So to answer your question: what would I like to know? Everything - I want to know age and gender and whether you keep bees or not. Single, partnered, or or a practitioner of concurrent monogamy. Kids? Parents still alive? Grandparents? And birth order -- are you the oldest of three? youngest of seven? if you don't want me to know - at least tell me where you are. (And how you got there? and why? and how long?)

But most likely, I will have to wait until label/identifiers come up in the context of a conversation and safer, mutual, self-disclosure -- the way one normally gets to learn about people. This calls for a poem by Theodore Roethke:

The Waking

  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

  I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

  I learn by going where I have to go.

  
  We think by feeling. What is there to know?

  I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

  
  Of those so close beside me, which are you?

  God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,

  And learn by going where I have to go.

  
  Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

  The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.


  Great Nature has another thing to do

  To you and me; so take the lively air,

  And, lovely, learn by going where to go.


  This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

  What falls away is always. And is near.

  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

  I learn by going where I have to go.