Tuesday, August 26, 2014

20140826.0652

I have noted before that I keep a journal--and have done so longer than I have maintained a blog, although it seems to me of late that I am more diligent in this webspace than I am in the pen-in-hand work of journal writing. Still, I try to start and end every day with writing, and I often take what I write here from what I wrote the night before there. It often works out well--when I keep up with my writing in the journal.

It is not only morning and evening, this webspace and my paper journals, in which I write. I do so throughout the day, as well. Planning lessons, making the marginalia that inform my lessons (my "lecture notes" are in the white spaces of the books I read and from which I teach), marking papers (for grades and for general comments), drafting and answering emails to/from students and colleagues, and drafting examples for use are all writing, of course, as are my freelancing endeavors and the work I do on The Work. (Which reminds me, there are calls for papers I need to answer.) I am inundated with writing as a matter of course.

The questions might then be posed: "Why write more? Why write for pleasure or leisure when you write so much for work?" Easy answers are that I do find pleasure in putting words on the page or, following the Good Doctor, that I do it so that I do not die. Another is that I have ideas in my head that plague me until I get them onto the page, and it is only through writing that I do so, but the writing that I do in other places and for other purposes does not allow me to release the thoughts from myself as I need to do. Yet another is that by framing my days with writing, I set up the expectation for myself to be a writer, and even if I am not a writer in the sense that many people use the term--I do not make my living telling stories in print, and indeed do little to tell stories in print instead of dissecting the stories others tell--I conceive of myself as a writer as part of my scholarly identity. Since I value that identity greatly, doing what I can to support it suggests itself as a good idea.

I try to frame my days with writing to give shape to them, to bound them, and so to shape and bound myself. For I am not yet the person I would be; I still need more training and discipline to become that person. Opening and closing with a common activity helps to do that. It gives me a sense of form and a pattern to follow, a structure around which to organize parts of my life and lenses through which to view my experience. That it leaves some record of itself in doing so is an added benefit; it is a pleasant thought to consider being remembered.

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