Well, as often happens, my “little break" turned into a long break. It has been the better part of a month since I last wrote, though I have certainly been reading and annotating plenty. I lost a bit of steam toward the end of this year, not just with this project, but with my work as well. This is nothing new for me. I noticed this boom and bust cycle several years ago when I started tracking the number of hours each week I spent in “deep work” as I was researching and writing my dissertation. I would start strong, improve week-over-week for a while, tire, flag, and ultimately crash. These cycles have tended to last about six weeks or so, but sometimes after the crash, it takes a while before I have the mental and emotional fortitude to begin again. I do not know whether this is something that I can change or whether it is something I just need to learn to work around. In any event, this year’s temporal pattern of blogging reflects this tendency clearly.
This short note will probably be the final entry of 2021, meaning that I managed to post 32 times, or at a rate of about three in every five weeks. I fell short of the weekly target I set for myself, but that was probably inevitable. In the end, though, I am satisfied with the fact that I managed to more or less keep it going for the whole year.
My goal for next year is to focus on quality over quantity. I still will probably only be able to devote one night a week to reading, annotating, and writing, but I would like to fill the gaps in my day with little bits and pieces to build on during the uninterrupted stretches I carve out for primary drafting and editing. My approach from here on out will be more careful, more considered, and more polished. I want to find joy in all aspects of the process of clarifying the insights I have gained from my reading about flow, creativity, and the good life over the past two years. I want to progress from enjoyment to enthusiasm. Because ultimately what I feel that I am doing here is exactly what is described below:
Train your voice. And use it. Again, it’s one of the most disappointing outcomes in life – to know that you’re a creative person, to have something Important that’s going to burn you up inside if you don’t share it with the world … but to lack the words or the music or the art to do so. In my experience, the unhappiest people in the world are mute creatives. To paraphrase Langston Hughes, sometimes they shrivel. Sometimes they fester. And sometimes they explode.
Every creative person should start a blog to express and develop their art. Do not distribute it. Do not publicize it. Do not play the ego-driven Game of You. Erase it all every six months if that’s what you need to do, because odds are you have nothing interesting to say! But start training your voice NOW, because one day you will.
As I enter yet another uncertain year, one in which I will likely have to make some daunting choices about the direction of my career and my life, the one thing that will be certain is that I can continue to write. At times last year, I shared my work on Twitter. I don’t think I will do this much anymore, if at all. I have often found writing—whether professional or personal—to become nearly impossible when my motivation for doing it involves the desire for recognition.
I am certainly not alone in struggling with this. But, what I’ve learned from revisiting certain key texts in the past month is that doing the work is its own reward. There is no guarantee that your work will be recognized, but you can be sure that if you become fixated on recognition, you won’t do much work at all. And you can be doubly sure that if you don’t do the work, you’ll never develop your ability to express yourself!
Anyway, all that to say: it has been an interesting year. I learned a lot about the material and about myself, and I’m looking forward to taking it further in 2022.