20190806.0430

I know there are a lot of things I need to work on improving in myself and in my life. Some of them, I am addressing, and my professional position is getting better, certainly. (A coming promotion and pay-raise have been confirmed for me, and I appreciate both.) Some of them are less overt, perhaps, or less measurable. (I know there is a prevailing obsession with "measurable outcomes" in many parts of life. There are many parts of life in which such is appropriate, though not so many as it gets applied to anymore.) But that does not make them of any less importance--though I don't mean to get into concerns of relative value at the moment. There'll be another time for that.
I mean rather to focus on one area where I'm making some progress, some improvement. I am working on being more openly kind than I have been. I know it's a low bar, the more so the earlier people came to know me. I imagine the people who knew me in high school thought me a mean-spirited little shit, and with justification; I took delight in petty quips and comments that demeaned others, thinking that they showed my superior quality. (They showed my quality, alright, but not its superiority. Rather the reverse.) As an undergraduate, I was a dour person, and, as a graduate student, I was focused on completing tasks more than on most other things--and not the things I ought to have focused on. As a professional...I've not been close to others at work. Sometimes, it's been for cause, but only sometimes...
Recently, I have been working on reaching out more, one being more overt in my appreciation of things. I've found it easier to do online than in real-space venues. I am not sure why. Possibly because stakes are lower and because what I have to respond to is what those to whom I respond have presented for me to see. Face-to-face, we offer more than we likely mean to offer others, bound by things we may well not be able to control. Online, what I get is what has been placed where I can get it; it is a more deliberately constructed version of the self. In some ways, it is a more moral thing because more fully consented-to. It is what that person putatively wants to be, and so can be responded to in ways that the messier, strangely constrained real and embodied cannot.
I'm practicing as I can. And I'm trying to translate the online practice into the real. It's working slowly so far, but I have hope for more improvement to come.