One of my blogosphere friends, Vicky Beeching, put up a vlog a couple of days ago exposing the incredible wreck that is the inside of her Jeep. You should check it out… it’s pretty amazing. :o) She actually used that as a springboard for some good thoughts on living an open transparent life.

Also, I was in Nashville several days ago at LifeWork 2.0 (a really great conference about blogging and building online communities). One of the things we talked about was how to improve your blog by making it more personal. To that end, I’m going to try to get a little more posted here about what I’ve been up to and what my life’s like. I live a pretty amazing life, so you should definitely come back to my blog several times a day to see if I’ve posted anything new, because you probably don’t have any life at all… :o) Just kidding. Really.

Anyway, I was inspired by these two things to share a picture of my room (sorry about that) along with a few of my thoughts on the topic.

:: my room at the apartment - click the pic for full-sized version ::

My photographer’s eye was tempted to rearrange a couple of the things in the photo for best effect, but I resisted and what you see is exactly how the far end of my room happened to looked like (from the vantage point of my bed) when I got up this morning. (You can see it’s difficult to make it back to my closet/pantry at the moment. Getting dressed or getting food are both quite a chore.) I will say that this was captured at a particularly bad moment. Most of the time, it’s not quite this bad, but I must admit, most of the time, it’s not exactly spic and span either…

So, on the topic of transparency, I think one valid question is “how much is too much?” :o) Some people wear all of their problems on their sleeves, and it’s pretty much a self-centered thing. Other people hide everything inside, and it’s also somewhat self-centered. (“What will people think of ME?”) Somewhere in-between there’s got to be a balance where we’re willing to share pretty much anything with anyone, but the main focus of that transparency is what might helpful to others. Of course, there may be times where we share stuff with good friends just because we find it helps us to do so. However, I think a better reason for transparency is to encourage and comfort others. When we’re transparent, we help others realize that it’s ok to also be transparent. For those who feel like they’re alone in their struggles, we find comfort in knowing that’s just a silly lie. Even more importantly, if we don’t try to hide who we are, we have the opportunity for much richer and authentic friendship.

What do you think? Where is the balance between being too transparent and not transparent enough? Other thoughts and reactions? :o) I’m gonna go clean my room now…