For the month of February I tried to narrate my work. I failed. Well, I succeeded a little less than half of the days.
On the first day I was sorting out whether to write in the first or third person, and if it should be present tense or something else. In the end I decided that in the moment describing what I was doing right now or what I was planning to do next didn’t feel quite right. So that left describing what I had just done. That’s what I did, and it felt the most tractable. The problem remained that I didn’t think that all the things I was doing were worth writing down this way.
I know it can be sometimes hard to judge what will be interesting later, so I adopted a strategy of random sampling. At 10:30 in the morning an alarm on my phone would go off to remind me to write down a few sentences about what I had just done. At least this way I got some practice in with whatever I had just been doing.
The overall goal of the month was to focus on the process of it and see what I learned. Somehow the mechanical exercise of writing down what I had just done a few times helped me to see that there may be a way forward to identifying and describing some aspects of what I am doing that might be interesting or useful for others to read, or myself in the future.
So much for narrating my work. At the start of the month I’m changing the activity of the next 30 days. It’s also time to change the season. I let this season, I guess I’ve been calling it a season of learning, run on a little longer than I should have.1 It’s been a few months of taking in new ideas and practicing new skills, and I feel it’s time to reverse the flow a bit, put more things out. Or maybe change the focus from working on the brain to working on the body. It’s already the first day of the new month and I haven’t settled on what I’m going to be focusing on yet. Maybe that’s ok, so long as the decision doesn’t drag on too long.
They’re my seasons, so I can do what I want. ↩