Day Thirty
I should open some
champagne, raise a glass. I have
completed the one month, five hundred word, writing challenge. Thank you for being here and reading this
and supporting me. Knowing you were here
kept me going when I wanted to stop.
As you know it has not
always been easy and at times all I wanted to do was sleep instead of
write. My posts have been inconsistent
and covered a range of topics in a range of styles and voices. Some posts, like yesterday’s post about my
views on economics, flowed out of my fingers faster than I could actually type
the words. I think it may be best piece. (Slowbow thought it was the
influence of Disco). In other posts I
have really struggled to get to five hundred words and filled in with a stream of
consciousness, redundant filler. Sorry for those days.
I have learned a lot
from this challenge. For one thing I learned that I do still have the ability
to stick to a task and keep going even when I really did not want to. Proving one still has determination and self-discipline
is a good thing. I feel a little
empowered by that.
 |
| Unlike St Paul, I sometimes struggled to write |
I also gained some
insight into how I learn. For this I
must thank the people who commented both here on the blog and on Facebook. You see, for me, part of writing is about
putting ideas out there in the world to test them and check what I think about
things myself. Can I unravel the ‘ball
of wool’ in my head that are my thoughts, set them out in a way that I, and I
hope other people, can understand and then test them with other people.
Once I have the ideas
out there on the screen in black and white, do they still really represent what
I think? Do I need to reevaluate and
rethink things? To find new or
supporting evidence? Is a person making
a stronger counter argument in the comments that makes me think and reassess?
For me this is learning
and it is the beauty of the writing process. It is the journey and not just the
destination. I try to be open to rethink
and reframe my views and opinions on the basis of a better argument or an
alternative viewpoint. If you are not prepared to question your own views about
something you are closed to growth.
So I am really
grateful to Dr. Slowbow and others who have made me think and reevaluate and go
back and reflect. Is this real social
constructivism (for those into pedagogical theory who are reading)? Am I constructing meaning and then
co-constructing new meaning and understanding with the person commenting? I think so.
So what now?
Although I have
completed the challenge, this is the start rather than the end. First I will take a short break of a few days
but my aim now is to try and write a post at least once a week, not a stream of
consciousness with redundant content, but on a topic I care about and have
something to say. I do hope that some of you will stay with me
for that. There are a few themes I touched on in this challenge that I would like to come back to and I now have a
notebook for ideas for writing that I carry with me.
For those interested in stats - just under 20,000 words and around 38 page views on average each day and 1553 over the last month! Oddly the most viewed post was day 6, the first day that I really struggled. Most readers in Finland (365), followed by the USA, then France (strange) and then UAE (254). The UK was next with just 62, proving that I am not popular there and I cannot go back even if the UK leaves the EU!
ReplyDeleteThank you Mark. It really has been very enjoyable to read about your thoughts. I feel I know you much better now than I did before. And to ne honest you appear as a very interesting person to know. So I do look forward to working with you and also to follow your blog posts also from now on. Maybe I could start writing something?? 😊
ReplyDeleteHi Pirjo, thank you for reading and for your kind comments. I am also looking forward to working with you in my new role. I am really excited about that. I do encourage you to write, why not? Indeed - I will speak to you about perhaps something we could work on together if you like the idea of co-authoring something?
ReplyDeleteMe - interesting? Naaa, just a boring, miserable old git with too many opinions (laughs).
Cheers
M
Hi Mark,
ReplyDeleteI had promised you a comment supérieure for your final post. I'm not sure I can do that alone, so I'm going to call upon one of my mentors to help me out. I had been reading The History of the Siege of Lisbon while you were going through your challenge. This book by José Saramago is a love story about writing, so there were many resonances between the words I found there and what I know about you and the challenges you were facing. [Please note: Saramago can be challenging to read because of the many voices he uses - frequently withing the same sentence. A comma is often an indicator of change of voice or a change between one speaker and another.]
I'd like to start José off with a little reflection on what I see as a locus for discontent you have with the "establishment". You've always impressed me as a man who has made his learning journey in his own way on his own terms. This is often in contradiction with the "accepted" path.
"You could have presented yourself as being self-taught, the product of your own worthy efforts, there's nothing to be ashamed of , society in the past took pride in its autodidacts, No longer, progress has come along and put an end to all of that, now the self-taught are frowned upon."
Through our conversations, I have found you to have a great store of knowledge, often eclectic, always ready-to-hand within a spirited debate. Over time, I have observed a trend toward wisdom - not the kind of wisdom that comes through meditation in a cave halfway up a mountain, but the kind of wisdom that comes through stubbornness in overcoming obstacles. Maybe that's too dramatic. I find it likely that 20 years from now you would be saying something like this,
"I've simply done a little reading, I've amused or educated myself little by little, discovering the difference between looking and seeing, between seeing and observing, Sounds interesting, It's elementary, I even imagine true knowledge depends on our awareness of the change from one level of perception, as it were, to another."
Over the years, I've seen you change in many ways. One of the biggest changes I've seen is in your approach to relationships. You have gained a self-confidence in reaching out to others and developed skills in connecting with people which I envy. With this blog, you have been exploring new ways to connect people through the power of words. I don't yet feel that you have found the shape of the benefits words can bring you and those you connect, its dangers, its potential. Saramago would, perhaps, caution you thus:
"I'm just connecting you, [he] said, indifferent to the destiny that makes use of [his] services and pays no attention to what [he] is saying, I'm going to connect, dial, transfer, switch through, link, contact, plug in , put you in touch, in [his] mind it is simply a matter of making it possible for two people to communicate, but even this straightforward operation is not without its dangers and should be handled with care. But these warnings go unheeded, even though we are reminded daily that every word is a dangerous sorcerer's apprentice."
And this power of words is not welcomed by most (all?) people. For most of us, "...we live cooped up in a room and paint the world and the universe on its walls,..." and do not welcome the reminder that our little rooms are as limited as they are.
As I close this comment, I want to thank you. You've given the gift of your thoughts to us. Bared your soul, as it were and I, for one, enjoyed the experience and feel I learned something from it. My hope is that you will continue. Not necessarily in this format, or in this way, but keep on writing. You've got stories to tell that I want to read.
"Like any story it can be told in ten words, or a hundred, or a thousand, or never end."
[All quotes from The History of the Siege of Lisbon, by José Saramago (1922-2010), translated from Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero]