The use of incoherent fragments

When I started this blog, it was a tentative thing–a platform whose significance I downplayed, but one through which I secretly hoped I’d accomplish something world-changing. I didn’t know what, but after all…who really needs just another “data dump” made public? I wanted to write valuable things, important things, things that earned respect.

Writing content that’s worth reading is a great idea. Unfortunately, this idea has translated into my writing very little. At the same time, I’ve gained appreciation for “simmers” of ideas: experiences like watching a dozen TED talks at a time, reading Alex Steffens’s Worldchanging book, or reading half a dozen books on related topics in a weekend. In this simmer, ideas collide, interact, and combine in wonderful ways. Ideas don’t need to be long; they don’t need to be fully developed to be useful. They just need to interact productively with other ideas. A tornado of index cards might have more value than a well-organized essay–even though the former looks like chaos, and is unlikely to win any literary prizes.

So…I’m going back to the origin of “blogging”. “Blog”, of course, is a contraction of “weblog”–in my interpretation, a stream of brief thoughts released to the Web. It may be that something grand emerges, but I’m not planning on it. What I am planning is that I’ll once again write to help order my understanding of the world. And sometimes, I’ll just share with little comment the small, delightful morsels that I’ve found on my experiential plate.