Friday 3 August 2012

Turning Ourselves Inside Out


I was browsing my blog stats this morning, [No, I’m not totally obsessed with my stats. I just like to look at them now and then!] and there are two blog posts that have been visited far more regularly than any of the others. I’m not sure why but I suspect it could have something to do with turning ourselves inside out. Allow me to elucidate:

Me in psychedelic mode
The most popular post by far is the one where I talk about Op-art, those psychedelic images that we loved so much in the 60s. In those days I just thought they were pretty patterns but I now know that they were a representation of the way the world looked when on a drug-induced LSD ‘trip’. Almost an entire generation wanted to find out exactly who they were. They wanted to get inside themselves. Although I was a teenager in the 60s, I was as naive as an Enid Blyton character and so I'm not typing from experience. I’ll never know what it felt like to be on LSD but I do know that quite a few overdosed, some never fully recovered and, rather than looking inside themselves, they only ever succeeded in turning themselves inside out. [See what I did there!]

The second most popular post is the one where I talk about finding history in holes, the way historical finds are always way below the level of our present day buildings. I mused about whether we were raising the level of our world higher and higher so that one day we might even ‘reach the moon’. Yes I was being fanciful but thanks to Anne at MorningAJ I was given some insight into the phenomenon. In her comment on that blog post she told us the following: 
‘Darwin did a study about how things get buried underground. He found out that earthworms bring literally tons of soil up to the surface overnight (as a team .... not each) and that is how things get buried so quickly .... The earth isn’t getting fatter. It’s turning itself inside out!’
Thank you, Anne, for educating me and for providing me with the title of this blog post!

So there you have it! Both of my top posts are about being turned inside out. 

Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much time looking inside myself. It certainly feels, when things go wrong, as if I've turned myself inside out. Maybe I should spend more time on the outside... or put another way, maybe I should get out more! [That was meant as a joke... I think!]   
Do you spend too much time looking inside yourself? 
And if you’re a blogger, do you have certain blog posts that appear to attract far more visitors than other posts for no apparent reason?