Writing and Not Writing

Why have there suddenly been posts here in last week or so, when there hadn’t been for months? What’s been happening recently that’s different?

Quite simply, I’m writing more because I’m reading, watching, and listening more. I write when I feel I have an idea worth sharing. Those ideas largely come from somewhere outside my head, from a book, an article, a video, or conversation. They then bounce around inside my head, collide with each other, and turn into something new. For the first four months of this year, though, I wasn’t exposing myself to those idea sources nearly enough.

And that has changed.

Error and Emotion

“Our capacity to tolerate error depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion.”
—Irna Gadd

I came across this quote in Kathryn Schulz’s excellent Being Wrong, a study of what it is like to discover we no longer believe things that we used to be believe. (“I used to believe that meeting was at 8 AM. I now believe it was at 6 AM. I also believe I wasn’t there.”) There’s at least three ideas directly from that book that I want to write about, but this one is somewhat tangential and also the most troublesome.

At first glance, I thought, “That makes sense. It’s hard to tolerate unpleasant emotions.” But as I thought about it, I realized that it’s not just the unpleasant ones that I’ve seen myself and others shy away from: it’s the intense ones.

When was the last time you let yourself be estatically happy? Feel unalloyed joy?

One Hundred and Eleven, To Be Precise

I’m now more than a hundred days into the year, and the first four months of 2013 have been a whirlwind of doing. One of my few regrets about it has been that this blog has dropped off the bottom of the priority list. What’s been above it?

• Building my first fighting kit and authorizing as an armored combat fighter in the SCA (as well as becoming a herald).
• Getting back into running by slowly up-ing my weekly mileage and doing yoga everyday to prevent the kinds of injuries that have plagued me before, then catching a cold and losing almost a month of workout time.
• Retiring my Dying Kingdoms character in epic fashion and rolling in a new one.
• Spending almost every weekend since the beginning of the year with Gwen, either at a DK or SCA event, or skiing.
• Handing off my Scrum Master responsibilities at work to the person who I had (secretly) trained to be my replacement.

When I write it like that, it sounds like so little, and yet, it’s been all-consuming. It’s also been a ton of fun, though I do like that I’m coming up for a brief bit of air.

Where Have I Been?

I’ve been trying to pay attention to this advice.

More (hopefully) to come.

Friday Roundup for 4 January 2013

Body and Mind

Yoga continues to be excellent for me; I’m glad I started, and I’m committed to making it part of my routine. The other development of the week was that we restarted SCA Fighter Practice after nearly a month off, due to the holidays. It’s good to spend a few hours a week having to pay close attention to my body and getting very immediate feedback when I do something incorrectly.

Friends and Family

Gwen’s folks were unfortunately unable to make it out for New Year’s, so we ended up going down to see the Rose Parade with our friends Emma and Matt instead. They, like me, grew up in the Midwest, so the notion of wanting to sit outside to watch a parade on January First was exciting. (We also learned that Emma has strong opinions regarding marching bands, specifically: More Sousa and less gold lamé.) It did mean we called it a night early on New Year’s Eve, but I was fine with that.

Create

Kind of a slow week in this category. I’ve decided that I want to generalize my knitting-related activities into “making”: doing something that produces some tangible output, be that knitting, weaving, cooking, or — what I’m doing right now — coloring in a coloring book.

Absorb

Currently Reading: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Things I’ve Read:

• OK Cupid: An Exploration Into Just How Low Some Guys Will Go
• Anchor Brewing Christmas Ale Labels
• To Stand or To Sit at Work: An Auto-Analytics Experiment
• The Future of You
• The Process Myth
• the majority of images
• Seven habits and routines that will help you become a more effective unclutterer
• Seven routines and guidelines to live as an unclutterer — no super powers necessary
• Best Nature Photos of 2012
• Facilities Management behind the Olympics
• The End of Economists’ Imperialism

This Week’s Soundtrack: Theatre Is Evil, Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra

Professional

Sort of spinning my wheels here, trying to figure out what I want to do next.

The Weekend

An improv show tonight, a party down in LA tomorrow, and starting some armorcrafting on Sunday.

You?