Writing & Reconnection: October (the finale)

Wait what? Ending a year-long theme in October? Are you mad?

Well, I might be, but that’s not the reason. If you cast your minds back to January of this year, I linked to CGP Grey’s video about themes as a means of introducing the concept.

Toward the end of that video, Grey notes that although he presented themes under the guise of Year of $thing, this was simply to provide a useful analogue to the concept of New Year’s resolutions. Themes are not time-boxed. They can last for a month, a season, or a decade. They are made to be flexible and to adapt to the changing tides of life. Themes last for as long as you, the individual, find value in having them.

And, personally, I no longer find the themes I established at the start of the year to be valuable, so I’ve decided to end them.

As has been noted in the last few updates of this nature, life events and work commitments have left me somewhat burned out, leaving less mental energy to commit to actually pursuing writing and reconnecting.

This isn’t a failure by any means. I have made some great progress over the course of the year. I’ve written more in the last ten months than I probably have in a good long time. I’ve made a few reconnections, but an incredible amount more new connections.

All progress has been forward progress. As themes, they have succeeded, it just feels like time for something new.

So here’s to my last update for the (not quite) Year of Writing & Reconnection.

Year of Writing

I have written some stuff. Not a lot of stuff, but more than in the last few months.

I finally published my (admittedly meandering and rant-y) post about being a maker, not a manager that has been simmering for quite some time. I’ve also made a start on a much longer, potentially much more technically-oriented post about a web development-related topic. Ooo, fun.

Fiction, poetry and prose remain relatively thin on the ground still, but ideas are still readily simmering there too.

Year of Reconnection

Reconnection as a concept hasn’t really happened, but new connections absolutely have been a thing this month.

I unfortunately missed this month’s furmeet (my first absence for quite some time, I think) due to feeling a bit under the weather. It also happened to be the day before I travelled waaaay up north to Edinburgh so that I could staff at Design System Day, a half-physical half-online conference about design systems which, contrary to the name, is two days long.

Yes, this was kinda just me doing a job, but I had a lot of nice natterings with other folks staffing the conference—many of whom were not from my team and whom I’d never spoken to before—as well as the conference’s attendees. It was fun! And tiring! And I spent the entire rest of the month staying at home because of it!

There were a couple of impromptu hangs with a couple of friends, but otherwise a fairly secluded time socially.

The themes of the future

Despite deciding to retire these themes, I’m still a little unsure of what I’m going to replace them with.

I’ve grown rather inclined towards a theme around exercising more. The stationary bike I purchased in the midst of the Covid lockdowns has spent more time being under a hill of beddings than simulating hill climbs.

What a second theme may be, if I opt for a second one at all, is still very much in the air. I guess tune in at the end of November to find out!