Monday, February 16, 2004

Back on the Horse

I'm back at work after four months of parental leave. You'd think that I would have had more time for reading and writing while I wasn't working eight hours a day, but blogging really fell off the back of the bus while focusing on our daughters (and moving, and trying to eke out some personal time). Work is so easy compared to full-time parenting.

Having some time away helped me consider why I write here and read through reams of other people's writing about education, technology and design. I think I may have burned out on the process -- at some point I was having a hard time caring about these fields at all, so I pared down the aggregator to a few must-reads, including very few work-related ones. I took a break and wondered whether I'd care again.

This week I started poking around some old haunts online, and one of the most interesting blogs I read was my own. Before you openly mock my narcissism, hear me out. I read so much other stuff online, that I don't often go back to see what I've written...but personal reflection was the original point of recording my thoughts here. Reading through nine months of my ramblings, questions and connections helped me realize how much I have been learning. I've just been forgetting to reflect.

I figure that this stuff is as close to passion as a work-related activity can get for me (don't get me started on leisure and Gen-X slackness), even if nobody else is paying attention. But I've also decided not to let the process own me -- I'm going to avoid ramping up the aggregator feeds again. You just can't know everything about even a small slice of a single information domain.

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