In July of 2011--a few months after graduating from college--I started writing a journal with the intention of recording a page of text everyday. To my surprise and delight, this simple exercise not only became a habit, but grew into a source of inspiration, perspective, and practice. Indeed, whenever someone tells me they want to turn their life around, I suggest they start a journal and keep it religiously. As Mark Twain said in The Innocents Abroad (1869), "Yes, a journal that is incomplete isn't of much use, but a journal properly kept is worth a thousand dollars--when you've got it done."
Why, you ask? Judging from my own experience, few activities are more conducive to processing the past and our own ideas than by putting them into written form. There's likely a scientific explanation for why this so often works, but what I find is that a record of one's experiences and thoughts make reviewing them easier. It helps us see from where we've come, and how our appraisal of events has either changed or remained the same over time. Perhaps as importantly, a piece of writing, even just the word-vomit of a stream-of-consciousness piece, requires a kind of architecture to stay together outside the confines of one's mind. As such, the act of writing seems to have the consequence--intended or otherwise--of making us give our thoughts and experiences coherence and connectiveness it might not otherwise have. Sometimes this process oversimplifies complex phenomenon (see most op-eds for examples), but for an individual building a narrative about, and an approach to, one's life may make useful insights more likely. This could be why I've found several instances of journal writers on the Internet using the exercise to process grief, loss, the end of relationships, or some other major change in their lives.
As Twain's words from above might suggest, while starting a journal isn't difficult keeping it often is. I've had this problem over the years, excitedly beginning the tasking of filling a book with thoughts and ideas each day, later to run out of steam and abandon the effort a few days, weeks, or months later. For some reason the original fire could not sustain the effort, and like a candle burned low, my flame of enthusiasm would wink out each time.
I think the biggest difference between this time and the others involved my openness to simplicity. Journaling can be as simple or complex as you want, and likely no one method will work for everyone. In my case, I had to make the exercise simple, and define success broadly: I could write about anything, so long as I did it every day, and filled a page in my book. Some days I could draw pictures of maps, and others it would be simply text. I could write about news, something I'd read, or a conversation I'd had, anything. Content mattered less than performing the exercise, and while I wrote (and continue to write) a lot of fluff and nonsense, I often feel better after doing it.
And of course it can be good fun to go back a year or two and see what was happening, what things had me excited or worried, or something goofy a co-worker said. It's for these things, among others, that I think made Twain rate a well-kept journal so highly.
Happy Thursday :)
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Thursday, October 10, 2013
A few projects presently underway
As some have noticed--and combing through the blog's archives, so have I--there's been a prolonged dearth of new posts on the site. In explanation, I can only think of few that fit, and only in a general way at that; that I have been either too busy, without any clear ideas for posts, or some combination of the two. As it is a cold, rainy day here on the mountain, and at the urging of some friends, I thought perhaps to describe some projects I'm currently undertaking which might some day lead to a post of their own. So here goes.
1.) Relearning the Bassoon:
I started playing the bassoon many years ago in the 5th grade. I enjoyed the sound it made, and felt drawn to its quirky shape and unique place in the elementary school concert band. I didn't take playing it seriously until high school, however, when a grouchy band director with a gift for invective pushed me to make bassooning a daily habit, which I kept more or less until my senior year in college.
Upon graduating, however, I found myself slipping ever more away from the practice, until sometime last year I basically ceased playing at all. Having gone almost a full calendar year without cracking the instrument's case, I recently decided to start playing again.
The results, alas, were not pretty. I sounded awful, and it is hard to keep going when the going is not good. Be that as it may, accepting that things would be bad before they improved seemed to help, and after a few sessions I am beginning to see some progress. The road is long, and it is frustrating sometimes to labor at something which once felt easy. Yet it is also rewarding to step back and fill-in the gaps in one's knowledge and skills, experiencing thereby the advantages of a solid and well-laid foundation as challenges grow more difficult. Which segues nicely into another project...
2.) Relearning Math with Khan Academy:
I've had difficulties of various kinds related to math since about the 5th grade, when we started learning the multiplication and divisions of numbers with decimals. For whatever reason, these topics left me briefly behind. Matters grew foggier the following year with a failure to intuit the concept of negative numbers, which caused all manner of problems with basic algebra. I might go on, but you can probably begin to see how these gaps in understanding and knowledge left me feeling quite incompetent as a mathematician, which over the years compelled me to limit the scope of my potential professional goals by the degree to which they employed and relied upon the math.
About a year ago, I discovered the site Khan Academy (an earlier post on the subject can be found here), and so much seems to have changed since. I used it whilst taking Statistics at the local community college, and again when I took Chemistry over the summer. The video lectures helped quite a bit, and the tutorials provided useful practice and feed-back.
Several weeks ago, with my second crack the GRE approaching, I decided to go back and try relearning math from the point at which I started having difficulties. As it turned out Khan Academy is great for this, having recently launched a new learning dashboard that makes tracking progress easy.
On the day of my GRE test, I'd "mastered" about 90 separate topics, and felt better versed in math than perhaps at any other point in my life. This new-found confidence yielded a smaller improvement on the exam than I'd hoped, yet the improvement and sense of progress compelled me to keep going, such that a few weeks later I've "mastered" over 200 topics, and intend to keep going until every skill on the dashboard is mastered.
It's been very encouraging, and I can't wait most days to jump in and practice some new skill (yesterday's challenge involved converting between degrees and radians). I'm thankful for Mr. Khan and his team for developing such a useful online tool, which brings us to final project I've been working on...
3.) Learning Spanish with Duolingo:
For a little over the past two years, I've had the pleasure to work alongside a number of Guatemalan immigrants. They're hard-working chaps with a great sense of humor, and I feel as though I learn something new from them everyday. In particular, I have picked up a bit of Spanish, a subject I never studied in school. Having never studied it formally, I found the language I was learning to be a smattering of vocabulary governed by the unofficial grammar of "Spanglish," which is effectively the language I and my co-workers use among ourselves. Not surprisingly, when conversing with each other the Guatemalans speak Spanish. Over time I've felt the urge to learn this language, at least to the point that I could understand what they said to me, and communicate in kind.
To that end I've considered taking a class, but that costs money and time which I don't necessarily have at present. With that, I took the lesson learned from Khan Academy and sought an online tool that could help me achieve the goal of learning Spanish. After some searching, I recently came across the site Duolingo, and began a regimen of Spanish instruction. So far, I've enjoyed using the site, a fairly recent start-up offering free language instruction for English speakers in Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Italian, and English instruction in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian. Interestingly, Duolingo is a "crowdsourced text translation platform," such that as students progress through the levels of instruction, they simultaneously help translate other websites over the Internet. So by learning another language through Duolingo, one not only consumes lessons but also contributes to a good cause.
Conclusion:
These projects, along with work and school, have kept me pretty busy since the end of the summer, but I've learned a lot in the interval, and perhaps some of what you see here will inspire you to attempt a new project or take up an old one of your own. There are lots of tools out there on the Internet if you have the time and inclination to figure them out; and finding one that works for you, can make a big difference in the quality and frequency of your practice. Underlying everything, however, is a good attitude that can simultaneously accept feeling incompetent at the beginning of a process while maintaining good habits and patience throughout. I am no expert in this subject, but taking on the projects described above has provided some helpful reminders of how nice it can be to work with a positive frame of mind.
Happy Thursday :)
1.) Relearning the Bassoon:
I started playing the bassoon many years ago in the 5th grade. I enjoyed the sound it made, and felt drawn to its quirky shape and unique place in the elementary school concert band. I didn't take playing it seriously until high school, however, when a grouchy band director with a gift for invective pushed me to make bassooning a daily habit, which I kept more or less until my senior year in college.
Upon graduating, however, I found myself slipping ever more away from the practice, until sometime last year I basically ceased playing at all. Having gone almost a full calendar year without cracking the instrument's case, I recently decided to start playing again.
The results, alas, were not pretty. I sounded awful, and it is hard to keep going when the going is not good. Be that as it may, accepting that things would be bad before they improved seemed to help, and after a few sessions I am beginning to see some progress. The road is long, and it is frustrating sometimes to labor at something which once felt easy. Yet it is also rewarding to step back and fill-in the gaps in one's knowledge and skills, experiencing thereby the advantages of a solid and well-laid foundation as challenges grow more difficult. Which segues nicely into another project...
2.) Relearning Math with Khan Academy:
I've had difficulties of various kinds related to math since about the 5th grade, when we started learning the multiplication and divisions of numbers with decimals. For whatever reason, these topics left me briefly behind. Matters grew foggier the following year with a failure to intuit the concept of negative numbers, which caused all manner of problems with basic algebra. I might go on, but you can probably begin to see how these gaps in understanding and knowledge left me feeling quite incompetent as a mathematician, which over the years compelled me to limit the scope of my potential professional goals by the degree to which they employed and relied upon the math.
About a year ago, I discovered the site Khan Academy (an earlier post on the subject can be found here), and so much seems to have changed since. I used it whilst taking Statistics at the local community college, and again when I took Chemistry over the summer. The video lectures helped quite a bit, and the tutorials provided useful practice and feed-back.
Several weeks ago, with my second crack the GRE approaching, I decided to go back and try relearning math from the point at which I started having difficulties. As it turned out Khan Academy is great for this, having recently launched a new learning dashboard that makes tracking progress easy.
On the day of my GRE test, I'd "mastered" about 90 separate topics, and felt better versed in math than perhaps at any other point in my life. This new-found confidence yielded a smaller improvement on the exam than I'd hoped, yet the improvement and sense of progress compelled me to keep going, such that a few weeks later I've "mastered" over 200 topics, and intend to keep going until every skill on the dashboard is mastered.
It's been very encouraging, and I can't wait most days to jump in and practice some new skill (yesterday's challenge involved converting between degrees and radians). I'm thankful for Mr. Khan and his team for developing such a useful online tool, which brings us to final project I've been working on...
3.) Learning Spanish with Duolingo:
For a little over the past two years, I've had the pleasure to work alongside a number of Guatemalan immigrants. They're hard-working chaps with a great sense of humor, and I feel as though I learn something new from them everyday. In particular, I have picked up a bit of Spanish, a subject I never studied in school. Having never studied it formally, I found the language I was learning to be a smattering of vocabulary governed by the unofficial grammar of "Spanglish," which is effectively the language I and my co-workers use among ourselves. Not surprisingly, when conversing with each other the Guatemalans speak Spanish. Over time I've felt the urge to learn this language, at least to the point that I could understand what they said to me, and communicate in kind.
To that end I've considered taking a class, but that costs money and time which I don't necessarily have at present. With that, I took the lesson learned from Khan Academy and sought an online tool that could help me achieve the goal of learning Spanish. After some searching, I recently came across the site Duolingo, and began a regimen of Spanish instruction. So far, I've enjoyed using the site, a fairly recent start-up offering free language instruction for English speakers in Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Italian, and English instruction in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian. Interestingly, Duolingo is a "crowdsourced text translation platform," such that as students progress through the levels of instruction, they simultaneously help translate other websites over the Internet. So by learning another language through Duolingo, one not only consumes lessons but also contributes to a good cause.
Conclusion:
These projects, along with work and school, have kept me pretty busy since the end of the summer, but I've learned a lot in the interval, and perhaps some of what you see here will inspire you to attempt a new project or take up an old one of your own. There are lots of tools out there on the Internet if you have the time and inclination to figure them out; and finding one that works for you, can make a big difference in the quality and frequency of your practice. Underlying everything, however, is a good attitude that can simultaneously accept feeling incompetent at the beginning of a process while maintaining good habits and patience throughout. I am no expert in this subject, but taking on the projects described above has provided some helpful reminders of how nice it can be to work with a positive frame of mind.
Happy Thursday :)
Thursday, October 3, 2013
A Remembrance of Tom Clancy (1947-2013)
I was surprised and saddened to learn yesterday that author Tom Clancy had passed away after a brief illness in Baltimore, Maryland. He was 66.
Mr. Clancy's books proved a huge influence on me throughout middle and high school, during which I read almost every work of his on my dad's bookshelf. I enjoyed his story-telling, particularly the dialogue, and the clarity, suspense, and detail of his works drew me in like few books could at the time.
Of Mr. Clancy's fiction works, I think my favorite is a tie between "The Hunt for Red October" (1984) and "Red Storm Rising" (1986). On the non-fiction side, I would say his cooperative work with Ret. General Fred Franks "Into the Storm: A Study in Command" (1997) proved the most interesting.
Finally, Mr. Clancy is among the first authors whose work spurred me to take up writing. The richness of his tales and clarity of his prose provided a useful model of a writing style I liked, and over the years has spurred me to keep practicing the craft. I am very thankful for this inspiration, as the writing journey has proven a most enriching one.
So many thanks, Mr. Clancy, for enriching my life and the lives of countless others. You will be missed.
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| Tom Clancy (1947-2013). Retrieved from (link) |
Of Mr. Clancy's fiction works, I think my favorite is a tie between "The Hunt for Red October" (1984) and "Red Storm Rising" (1986). On the non-fiction side, I would say his cooperative work with Ret. General Fred Franks "Into the Storm: A Study in Command" (1997) proved the most interesting.
Finally, Mr. Clancy is among the first authors whose work spurred me to take up writing. The richness of his tales and clarity of his prose provided a useful model of a writing style I liked, and over the years has spurred me to keep practicing the craft. I am very thankful for this inspiration, as the writing journey has proven a most enriching one.
So many thanks, Mr. Clancy, for enriching my life and the lives of countless others. You will be missed.
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