Recalibrating, Again
I've committed myself to a more regular blogging practice, but am early enough in that commitment that it hasn't become natural yet. There's a thing that happens when blogging becomes fully integrated into my ways of working that I've described in the past as "making me look at the world like a person who wants to share parts of it." It's not just the sharing bit, though -- I can and do still spot stuff and share it via hcommons.social, if a bit irregularly. It's more seeing stuff in the world that I want to think more about, and taking the time required to do that work.
It does take time, after all, and as I emphasized in my Reclaim Open keynote a couple of weeks ago, it's real work. And in the years since my blog was really active, one of the other things that has happened (in addition to social media hoovering up all my quick inconsequential first impressions) is that I've taken on a ton of other work. The administrative responsibilities involved both in my role at MSU and my role in the lab I lead and the projects I direct, are pretty consuming. And what writing and thinking time I've had has gotten funneled into book projects, for the most part.
In fact, I just submitted the revised manuscript of Leading Generously to the press a couple of days ago. I originally imagined this project to be a fairly quick one, and in fact signed a contract with a super short deadline back in early 2021. Between pandemic burnout and the major grant proposals, projects, and reports that followed, it would have been unlikely that I'd get the thing in on time anyhow. But add to that my recognition that the project as drafted was thin, in the worst possible sense, and that there was so much complexity that I was avoiding, and it was all but inevitable that I'd find myself over a year and a half late.
It's in, though, and I'm still in the honeymoon phase of knowing that it's on someone else's desk for a bit. (There will come an end to that phase, once I start really worrying about the feedback that's ahead.) Even more exciting, though, is what's next:
...
Nothing. I have promised myself that I will take at least a year before I really consider embarking on a big new writing project, not least to be sure that I have something worth saying. I have a huge backlog of stuff I want to read and think about, and I'm hoping that some of that thinking will happen here. And perhaps the thinking I do here will (as has happened before) lead me to something larger, but perhaps it won't. Perhaps the recalibration that I need is both a matter of allowing myself to linger in things that would otherwise just be a quick social media post and a matter of doing so in relatively small, contained, but regular ways.
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