Welcome back

Roughly 76 weeks ago I published my first ever blog post on here. At the time Covid was in full swing, it was January of 2021, and Denver had announced that they were closing indoor dining for restaurants and bars during January and February- a little bit about Denver, if you didn’t know, is that the average daily temperature in January is roughly 34°; meaning that most bars and restaurants had to either close for those two months or they severely cut down on their staff size and hours open. This is what the bar I was managing decided to do, and in an effort not offend the staff they kindly asked who would be willing to not work for the next two months. I had sort of mentally checked out of the service industry anyway by that point, and I decided that I would be willing to take the next two months off. I won’t lie, it was pretty great. I wrote about seven pieces over the next two months, recorded a bunch of episodes for a podcast, and spent a plethora of days snowboarding.

Here I am, a year and a half later, and post-February I published a total of 8 pieces; my “output” during those two months equalled my “output” for the next year. I am not here to say I failed but to say, I am going to start again. After all, my life looks a lot different now, than it did when I started writing. When I started, I was basically unemployed, living with my brother, and my focus was reading, writing, and working out. Now I have finished my first year teaching, moved in with girlfriend this spring, we are working on remodeling her basement with her dad. While I would like to lay the blame of my hiatus as the feet of teaching, ask any teacher how it creeps and crawls into every crevice of your life (especially year one), that would be slightly disingenuous due to the cliff arriving before my job transition.

Regardless of whose feet at which the blame lays, I remember a conversion my girlfriend and I were having around my birthday, in the spring, and she asked what my goals were for the next year; which was an interesting question for my to think about because a year prior, her and I hadn’t met, and I had not even applied for the teaching job the I currently hold. My point, or place I started to think, was just how unexpected turns life can take. Not as a posture of closed-off-ness, but of openness to the next bends in the road. The one goal I did set for myself was that my work/life balance would be such, heading into year 2 of teaching, that I can published one, to two, pieces a month.

So I think the real question here is why do I write? Or why do I want to write? Why is this a habit, a skill, that is as important as yoga, or working out, or eating clean? I would love to write a book one day, but this isn’t ever going to make me money, so on some level why pursue it? Well I think it is valuable for a few reasons, but mostly to help myself think.

Writing about anything will usually show you that you don’t know that thing as well as you thought you did. When we say things like, “I can see it in my head” but it doesn’t make sense to anybody else, the question remains: Does it make sense at all? Is it a complete thought or idea? Would a stranger be able to grasp this?

Paul Graham dives into this more fully in his essay, Putting Ideas Into Words, by saying

Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it. Putting ideas into words is certainly no guarantee that they'll be right. Far from it. But though it's not a sufficient condition, it is a necessary one.

Simply, a lot of us are going through the same experiences and often think we’re alone in them. The things that feel most personal are the most universal. Whatever you have to say is likely helpful to someone else or can help them feel seen or understood.

This doesn’t mean I can perfectly sum up the experiences of others. I can barely sum up my own- what it does mean is that I want to try to tap into the joy, the sorrow, the beauty, the spaces in-between where we all live.

I was having a conversation with my girlfriend the other day, and something came up that I had written previously about, so I pulled up an old post and she read my thoughts on the topic. Her response was something along the lines of “well that is a nice sentiment but it isn’t practical to how people act.” While I don’t necessarily think she was wrong, I also think there is a conversation to be held around the role that idealism vs realism play in the world. On some level if we are thinking about how governments and politicians determine action they need to operate within the practical. Otherwise, the policies with have large gaps and loop holes (side note: I actually think you see a lot of this in our policy making already). The good news is that you and I don’t run governments, we aren’t making policies that impact the lives of thousands, or millions, of people. We live in a world where our decisions, our balance of idealism vs realism, will impact MAYBE dozens. Probably a handful. This is important to remember because hope, and love (which I have written about before) are tied at the hip. This hope, this love, this recognition of the human in the other is what binds us. I want this to be a place that shines a light on those binds, those connections. It is certainly something that makes me nervous, it took me a couple hours to get this “intro” written, but it's a journey and endeavor that I love. Nervousness, however isn’t a reason for inaction but an invitation to step into growth.

This is a return to merriment, joy, and sorrow. This view that life holds that ordinary and the unique. The common and the uncommon. Thank you and I’ll see you next Monday.

ℹ️ Read more about Monday’s Don’t Suck here.

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