Day 17: Round up

So, I've been doing this for seventeen days, and I thought I'd step back and see what I think of it, and (if you're interested in telling me) what you're thinking of it.

First, thank you guys for leaving comments!  I've responded to the ones where I know your email address, but I can't, alas, respond when I don't.  (As before, if you are interested in that kind of conversational comment style, you can tell me your email address at knittinglinguistATgmailDOTcom, replacing the AT and the DOT as appropriate, of course.)  A few quick responses:

- Laine - a hairku!!  dude, thank you for that! my whole family and I thought that was awesome :)
- greenmtngirl - thank you for the kind words on the intent/impact post, I'm glad it seemed useful; I'd love to know more about your nonprofit
- Elizabeth, Jean Marie, TK, Portia, Allison, Willow, and Polly - thank you all for saying hi and encouraging the magpie theme; and especially, thank you for sticking with the vagaries of this particular blog, I'm really glad you're here.

Second, it's an interesting experience to have made this commitment to write something every day.  I wake up full of ideas, and my day only gives me more.  But I often find that, as with so many other things, my day gets away from me, and a few times I've hit the end of the day and found myself almost doing what I usually do with things like this (physical therapy exercises, I'm looking at you): thinking, ah well, I'll do better tomorrow.  In this case, though, the commitment to put something up here is an additional motivator.  I don't know if that motivation will fail at some point - it will be interesting to see how it goes over time.   (An unintended consequence of thinking about posts I could write is that what I refer to in my meditation practice as "narrator mind" is strengthened.  This is a phenomenon to observe; I'm sure I'll write about it at some point.)

Third, it's also interesting to see what themes come up for me most often.  I'm working on developing useful labels/categories/metadata.  It seems to me that there are posts and ideas that fall together in my mind, and if I can find the right label, it will help to collect them - and maybe even help me to see themes and connections that I didn't notice at the outset, but that arise as this project continues.  This is a sort of interesting unintended consequence, to begin to refine my understanding of my own lenses and areas of attention.  These labels seem to fall at different levels, too (I'm not sure that's a clear way to put it...).  So, for example, one is interconnection, which is rather philosophical, not to say metaphysical.  Another is a sort of observation of how my mind works (like the swimming laps one), and another is curiosity/fact-finding (soon you will all know more than you wanted about which strokes burn more calories, for example).  Those are much more concrete than the interconnection thing.  And, of course, there's the Venn diagram of themes; social justice and interconnection appear together, and mindfulness overlaps with both of those.  Only seventeen posts in, it's hard to tell what might happen, but, as I said, it's an intriguing (to me) outcome of this project.  Who knew metadata would become its own theme?

So I guess all of this is to say that, reflecting on the last few weeks, I see some of the shape of what I might learn from doing this, and also the shape of the challenges the project will offer me.  (I think I should keep rereading that post I wrote on swimming laps, because when I think about how many more days there are left to go, it's intimidating and tempting to let myself off the hook by quitting now; when I think about tomorrow's post, or one more week of posts, it's less overwhelming.)  The semester approaches; that will be a significant challenge for me.  Another is whether and to what degree I want to take risks with my writing here.  I posted a few narrative/descriptive type pieces in the period of my off-again on-again writing; it felt risky, but also like something I'd like to challenge myself to do more often.  So that, too, will be interesting to observe - what do I end up "using" this for?

In any case, here I am.  It's a beautiful day, and the sun is shining where I am.  I hope each of you has at least a bit of brightness in your day, too.