Posted by Hamlet:
To me [Denmark] is a prison.
Rosencrantz:
Why then your ambition makes it one. ‘Tis too narrow
for your mind.
Hamlet:
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a
king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.
Guildenstern:
Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
**********
I haven’t been writing here in a while, you may have noticed.
And me being me, this is substance for introspection, then a shrug, then a long absence.
Two things are at work. One, I’ve been through an upheaval with work. Until that’s settled, I don’t have much to say about the stuff that’s been eating up most of my mental space and energy for the past several months.
Two, I genuinely question whether I’ve got anything much worth saying, or at least much worth taking your time to read.
An upside of being a generalist and associative thinker is that I know a little bit about a billion things, and I love connecting ideas and people in ways that hadn’t occurred to anyone else yet. The downside is that I have little patience to dig in and write long thought pieces about current issues or the wit to crack wise about said issues or the attention span to wrangle through some knotty problem that everyone else seems all hot about.
Honestly, I spend a lot of time inside my head managing the daily tasks that don’t make much fodder for good writing. And while that in itself may be a sign that I need to change some stuff about my life, it doesn’t really give me anything to say right now.
I’d like to think that I occasionally have thoughts that others find useful. But increasingly I find that others are already saying most of those things, and better. I started my first blog (on Xanga … oh my) in 2005, when I’d barely cracked 30 and thought I had Things To Say.
Now that I’m older, I find that I don’t really have much to say at all, and I probably never did.
I also miss the community and interaction that I had back in the Xanga days. We were a small bunch, and my followers usually knew me in person or had become internet friends because we read and commented on each other’s blogs. Posts were fun because they kicked up some dust (or a dust storm occasionally)…. you had to avoid the drama but at least there was some life, yannow?
But WordPress is a big town, and there’s no conversation here really. Occasionally my FB posts of these entries spark a comment or two, but even that is rare in a world where Facebook adjusts its algorithm weekly (it seems) so that nobody ever gets a news feed worth reading.
Yeah, I’ll admit it. I miss “the old days.” I guess I’m that old now…. #getoffmylawn
*****
I’d like to think that there’s a good discipline to writing every day, so I may yet take up the habit for the sake of my own sentence craft. I write so much less now that I’m not teaching, and one should never let writing skills get too rusty.
Clearly this is at odds with everything I wrote earlier.
So you can see my conundrum. 🙂
Just:Words 