A few days ago I logged in and saw my blog has over 1,100 followers. I stared at the screen a moment. My eyes stopped blinking. I no longer heard my heart beating. One thousand, one hundred people.
And they’re all following me.
It’s hard to believe last year I had a goal of reaching 500 followers and now I’ve more than doubled that. But now that I’m here, what does it mean? What should I do?
Yesterday I began sharing the thirteen things I learned in 2013–a look at thankfulness, thinking, and things, with the great revelation that things don’t matter. Today I pick up the narrative once more for the next five lessons on our syllabus.
If you missed Part 1, find it here.
It’s hard to believe this year was, in fact, no longer than last year–it just felt that way. The journey I’ve taken from January 1, 2013, to today has been among the most adventurous I’ve ever had–blessed with confusion and clarity, strewn across two continents, and featuring my life-long highest and lowest points, it’s certainly been anything but expected.
And yet I’ve survived and stand here today a changed man. I’ve learned a lot along the way–a lot more than algebra and analysis, conservation and creative writing, policies and politics–things that fill me with more wisdom than Zelda with her Triforce piece (I’ve been playing again lately), and as my last act of 2013, I want to share these lessons with you.
Some days ago, amid all this hubbub over Chick-Fil-A, I came across a short but sweet post written by blogger Gwynn Compton asking, “What helps you write?” I thought it would make for a brilliant distraction form my typical Tuesday talks–because, without any inspiration to write, there’s no amount of writing advice that’ll help your words shine.
So with a great letter of thanks to Gwynn, here’s what helps me write–a few items that may in turn help you to write, too.
The day begins and I’m half-asleep and the half that’s awake would really like to roll over again and just go back to sleep. In the afternoon my feet ache and my throat’s sore from saying the same thing over and over again to a hundred different people–I could do this with my eyes closed, I tell them, and it’s true–and my eyes drift toward my closed iPad, longing for its internal delights–or that it might morph into a pillow for a quick nap.
It’s a little hard to see why these are related.
But once the connection is made, it’s amazing.
I just finished reading an article about Israel’s draft law, and I find it ironic because it concerns precisely what I was speaking about yesterday in my thoughts on this week’s teaching from the Pirkei Avot. Not about integrity or faith, however, as metaphors of relief from citizenship and earning a livelihood–no, not at all. In Israel, the trouble isn’t in taking this teaching metaphorically, it’s about taking it literally.
I’m in the car. Somewhere between South Carolina and Alabama it strikes me that I am not alone. Yes, this whole time I have been surrounded by four friends and coworkers and teachers (each possessing a varied combination of the above) that I feel I know well, but apparently don’t know as well as I could imagine I do. Here they are, the youngest among them exactly twice my age, and they’re identifying in me the things I’ve failed to admit to myself for years.
First and foremost I am a man of ideas. I have always been a man of ideas and I presume I shall always be a man of ideas. As such, I am of this nature easily inclined to fall in love with an idea, to infatuate myself in concepts and theories, to indulge in the orgasmic philosophies of imagination and the perpetuation of thought itself.
As such, I am also of the nature of put into things more thought than one might deem reasonable for the affair. I consider at length where I’ll spend my money, how I will spend it, and what will remain after it’s spent. I can spend days on end merely considering which movies, which books, which ideas I liked more than the last.
Take history. But two short years ago I was beginning college. I loved the idea of history, that ability to raise one’s eyebrows and make a well-informed comment upon how this has all happened before. Just look back in that year, at that place, at that one moment which parallels this, and you’ll see, very clearly, how we’ve just repeated our mistakes–for better or for worse I’d leave to the audience, but it’s only one such possible encounter with a historian.
Of course, but two short years ago, I was also beginning my first course in history. And I can assure you all, there was no delight in the act for the delight that mirrored the concept. I was bored. I sought answers and insight that didn’t exist in the text, that didn’t exist in the mindset of history. Though I still love the idea of history, and being historically knowledgeable, the study itself remains elusive, a passion I cannot touch.
And as a mathematician, I’m also exceedingly fond of tangents.
The Writingwolf: Words and Wonders 