This is a 10-minute post.
As with most educators nearing start of session, I’ve been running around like a headless chook for the last couple of weeks. As expected this has caused my blogging time to drop off completely and in fact it’s been 10 days now since my last post, which is an unprecedented gap here the last couple of years.
I was reflecting on this last night while doing the dishes – which seems as appropriate a time as any to think about your motivations for blogging. I was brought to wonder what is it that causes me to feel the itch to write if I haven’t been able to do so for a period of time. To a fair degree I think the saying “Writer’s write because they can’t not write” explains a bit of this, and yet in my case there’s more to it than that.
I blog because it helps me explore, self-assess, reflect and document my current intellectual state. This includes concepts I’m grappling with, ideas that I’m exploring, research I’m conducting, or support I’m attempting to lend to others.
As wierd as it sounds, when time passes and I’m not able to do this I start to grow out of touch with my own intellectual state. Ideas start to fade, continuity becomes disrupted, concepts to explore rise and then disappear unresolved. The end result is I feel less on the ball, more reactionary, and more cognitively disquiet.
Effectively I blog because it helps me think, work, and remember.
The interactive and social elements of blogging add another dimension, certainly; and while I gain tremendously from this (hopefully others do as well), it’s not the primary driver for maintaining a blog – at least not for me.
As I’ve said before, I started blogging to start building structure amidst all the intellectual and cognitive clutter that had developed in my mind – to externalise around knowledge you might say. Opening this process up to others was a natural decision, but it was one that was made “just in case it’s useful to other people” not because I anticipated it actually would be. That people actually do at times benefit from what I write is a satisfying yet unplanned outcome.
What this train of thought ultimately points to is the intense significance of leaving time for reflection. If you don’t know where you’ve been how can you know where you’re going? Some people are naturally able to maintain continuity amidst chaos; maintain focus amidst distraction. I’m not one of those people. I have a really bad memory and get distracted and mentally overloaded very easily. So I blog to help keep myself moving forward.
I enjoy blogging, although I am a relative rookie at it. I also agree that given the time of year I have less time to do it. Too often I work on my posts to clean them up, which ultimately bogs me down and I lose my zest.
I like the idea of a 10 minute post. My question is how do you get past the concern that the thoughts are not communicated clearly, so it makes sense?
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I have not made space for blogging much myself the past few weeks, and if you could look inside my head you would see the messy results. I agree that it is a very helpful reflective and purgative practice – get the noise out of your head and make it a more orderly something on the (virtual) page. Often we don’t know what we think until we write it.
And now I’m off to finish writing a conference paper about secularism in Iraq. I’m interested to find out what my opinions are on that…
“And now I’m off to finish writing a conference paper about secularism in Iraq. I’m interested to find out what my opinions are on that…”
I love it!
That’s a statement perhaps only another blogger can identify with and find humour in. You’re obviously keeping it a secret from yourself.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Mike
Agreed. Been thirteen days since my last post. Lost the mojo last December and posts have been erratic since then. The focus is lost. Environment has something to do with it as well I think. If you are in the midst of a dynamic environment then your are exposed to more creativity, ideas and so on. I could have written your post Mike. Bad memory, clutter, overflowing ideas. That sounds like me. I think too much. It will probably annihilate me if I do not stop thinking, one day.
I make up for the hiatus by reading other blogs and writing the odd comment. Your post resolved me to do one thing. Start eliminating the clutter.
Cheers, John
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