As I write this, I’m on two shots of espresso, three hours of sleep, and seven days into the vast reaches of my own mind; not having interacted with society for the last week without the mediation of my 15” notebook screen on account of a particularly nasty viral infection. (By the way, if you’re debating, my conclusion is that 13” is more than enough).
I have also spent far too much of those seven days watching the madness of US and global geopolitics, thoughts spinning.
I have wanted to start both a blog and a podcast for a very long time. I take pride in my mind, my drive to learn, and my curiosity and ability to talk and listen to people from (almost) all walks of life and places in the world. I am a voracious reader, podcast listener, online-course enroller, news consumer, talk attender, and subway-conversation-accidental-eavesdropper. Since I was a child, some part of me has believed that if I can gather all the information, learn it all, and piece it all together, I can figure it all out: and once it’s figured out, I can fix it. Put the world back as it should be.
That beautiful if ill-advised kernal of belief has taken me from my upbringing on a small farm in rural northern Canada, to joining a brand new university that had yet to properly exist when I enrolled, to living in capital cities and megopoli across nine countries and four continents, and working a wide variety of jobs and voluntary roles as I sought to learn, experience, and make sense. And, I tried to absorb all the data as I went along as well. According to my online tracker, Goodreads, I have read 442 books (750 on the to-read shelf). I’ve attended three excellent, cross-disciplinary, forward-thinking universities over six years, and I’ve asked so many questions in my courses that my professors are probably over the moon that I have a blog to yap on about in now, rather than sidetracking their classroom or cornering them after class yet one more time.
In short: I have thoughts. But, I can also struggle in paring them down or neatly categorizing them. I think in a very associative way where everything is related, and my wish to be accurate, to be truthful, to give proper context, to consider all the relevant questions, makes it challenging to cut content or corral it into a targeted topic category or brand. So my blog has never made it out of a Notion page tumbling over itself with list upon list of blog ideas, notes, and links.
What is different now is that my last year of Master’s studies have started to coalesce for me around a worthy concept I think is both coherent and clear, and yet open and permeable enough for the evolution that all good thinking brings.
— With —
I’ll share more in my next post.
stoked to associatively think WITH you :)
I’m all ears, and can hardly wait to see what you create ☺️