From MUSE: Why Post?

I was just doing dishes and thinking* about teaching and thinking about actually integrating all the things I think about into my practice, and I realized that what helps me (will help me) to do this is articulating my thoughts and then going back and reminding myself of them.  And I realized that this is one of the reasons I post so much here**: It is helpful for me to be able to review the thinking that I have done on a subject.*** 

I used to just take notes on the random things that came into my mind.  Without a purpose, these notes would generally remain half-formed.  Posting on a site like this gives me the impetus I need to think through things a bit more without the requirements of a formal essay. Especially with practice, this more-but-not-full thinking through doesn't take much time, and it gives me something to look back on, to pull from, in a way that random notes in journals and on paper scraps does not do.  I still take those notes, and sometimes I incorporate them into posts, essays, but often, now, I start here.

The looking back is sometimes, like the blogging itself, just totally egocentric, like looking at baby pictures of yourself.  But it's not all that, and I have found that my former thinking starts conversations with my current, challenging and expanding it in a really helpful way.  Maybe I'm just absent-minded and other people can do this without writing down their thoughts, but I find that I lose the old stuff if I don't write it down.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I'm headed back to the dishes now.  Would love to hear what you think, though.

xo

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*Doing dishes is a great time for thinking, especially when, as is the case at my house, you can't really hear what's going on outside the kitchen, including on the stereo, while the water is running

**And on my other blog, which I am always scared to share with people, but here we go.

***Another reason is that I want to share and am hopeful that others will have thoughts on these topics to stretch and challenge my thinking.


This post was also published on MUSE '13