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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

First Forays

Why we write?

Deep somewhere in the recesses of human consciousness, there's a fundamental need to frame our experiences - both great and small - as a coherent narrative.  We all feel like (and do!) have stories to tell.  And all of these discrete anecdotes string together and flow into a larger, more complex tale that we use to validate ourselves and shade our lives with meaning and value.  It's in the process of reflection required in order to write, to craft a meaningful story, that this coherency achieves its inner and outer forms.  By inner, I suppose I mean the framework for understanding the world that we both build and exist in at a given moment; by external, I mean such forms as the diary, journal, Facebook page, or blog.

I'm taking these first steps into the land of the digital diary as an attempt to satisfy both the inner need we all feel to fashion a legible tale of our own lives, but also to give form to a strong compulsion to write.  I've been away from academic work for the better part of two years, and my writing output has been essentially nil (apart from journalling) since I walked away from the University.  To say that I thought my literary ambitions were dead and gone would be an understatement.  I fairly cast them out when I quit teaching.  But in recent months, I've felt a deep urge to write again.

But write about what?

Nothing in particular, maybe; everything in general, I suppose.  Since being out of the academic universe I've had my horizons expanded considerably.  My relationship to the literature in which I formerly hoped to make my home and my salary has changed.  It's no longer the end-all I once fancied it.  I read now whatever I want to read, and that ranges from Anglo-Saxon homilies to sports memoir to paleontology.   I've adopted a lifestyle of rather intense physical fitness: cycling, running, and Triathlon races take up much of my calendar space, and preparing for these takes up even more.  And I'm on my way back into the sphere of education, with a view towards teaching or education administration.

So I suppose this will be a proving ground of sorts for me; a place first to scribe, then to share, and hopefully to refine my ideas about the three major subjects that are foremost in my thoughts: teaching (since I start again this Spring), endurance athletics (since this is a major fixture of my life), and reading (since this is a lifelong pursuit and a source of much pleasure).  These three fields, and especially the way they merge and flow into one another - and my constant attempts to balance these against the demands of time and energy - will, I imagine, constitute the bulk of the writing to follow.

Apart from the catharsis I hope to achieve, and the construction of some kind of record of my interests (it's too early, I suppose, to bandy around words like "legacy"), the following will be a rambling journey - a diary at times, diatribe at others, analysis at whiles, and perhaps even a bastard form of philosophy.  But whatever it may be, I certainly hope it is a record of my brief moment in the sun.