A New Year

So 2017 has come and gone. Not my favorite year, by any standard. But the New Year has arrived and with it the opportunity to re-establish at least some of the productivity routines that were disrupted last year when I had to undergo two hip replacements (the first one failed) and an extended course of antibiotic infusions. One of my tentative goals for the New Year, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, is to try to breathe some life back into Throughlines.

I began this blog eleven years ago, when I was still teaching full time. It was at the start primarily a venue for me to reflect on my teaching practice and think my way through various ideas that presented themselves during the course of my professional practice. I have long held as an article of faith that writing is a very powerful tool for the generation and elaboration and refinement of thoughts which would otherwise remain either unarticulated or inarticulate.

If your goal is to be a thoughtful person—and I can’t think of any reason why it shouldn’t be, can you?—then an obvious question is “How can I encourage myself and support myself in my attempts to be thoughtful?” And my answer to that questions would be, “Well, you could try writing about what you are thinking.” Because, as I often told my students over the course of 45 years in the classroom, writing makes thinking hold still long enough for you to have second thoughts, not to mention third or fourth thoughts. If there is something you take seriously, or something that you have ideas about that you want to be taken seriously, what better way to make that happen than to write about it?

I also felt at that time that as a teacher of English (and therefore of reading and writing) I had a personal and professional responsibility to my students to model for them what I was asking them to do. I am all too familiar with teachers who are very comfortable giving students directions—and often very counterintuitive and counterproductive directions—about how to write, but who never write anything themselves more ambitious than the occasional email or text message.

I’ve been retired for four years now. I still return to my old school to teach a high school English course during the summer session, but during the rest of the year I am most often alone with my thoughts. The continual overflow of ideas from issues raised in class discussion is no longer provoking me to speak, or to write. Most days the only person I speak with at any length is my wife, and there’s a limit to what I can reasonably expect her to put up with in terms of incoming verbal stimuli. As an outlet (and an act of discipline) I do keep a journal on my computer, and my default goal is to write 500 words a day. On the days when I do write, it’s easy enough to come up with the words. But to be honest in the last year or so there have generally been more days when I never got around to writing than days where I did. Part of that is inertia. And I suppose, part of that was the default gestalt of 2017, existential despair. It’s hard to rouse yourself for a principled defense of thoughtfulness in a world in which there is so often so little on display. 

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But I’ve dug through my drawers and dusted off my rose-colored glasses. I’m suiting up. I’m working out. I’m making a public commitment to my legions of devoted followers, that I’m going to post something here at least once a week, for as long as I can do it. Not so much on your behalf, but on my own. 2018 is going to be the new 2006. Buckle up.