Tag: writing

Discernment

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“It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech.” – Mark Twain

One of my favorite words these days is discernment, especially when it applies to my own actions. That is to say, when I take the time to discern to what I should or should not be doing.

Oxford Dictionaries defines discernment as “the ability to judge well.” I think of it more broadly as taking the time to choose how I apply my energy and time. Also, to notice when I’m trading routine for quality.

Lately I’ve been writing my blog posts on the morning of the post instead of what I’d done most of the year, which is to draft something the day before and finish it the morning I post it. Putting a little time between when my fingers hit the keyboard and when I hit “publish” served to give me space for reflection and hopefully be a little more thoughtful.

Discernment tells me I need to stop publishing every day so that I have more time to think about things. So that I can do a better job. Maybe three thoughtful pieces a week instead of five slapdash ones. And now I’m laughing because of the post I wrote about Interrupting the Pattern earlier this week – it’s hard to break a habit.

What role does discernment play in your life?

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Blog Tour

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“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” – Joel Barker

I glanced at the maps on the stats page of my WordPress blog yesterday and was delighted the sight of this map:

There’s a fantasy I have in my mind of taking a blog tour. Loading my kids up in a RV and driving to see my blog friends. The WordPress stats don’t show me any detail within a country so going off the top of my head from where I think people live –  down the West coast, Oregon, California, Arizona, Texas, up through South Dakota, over to Colorado and then to the West coast of Canada and then Alaska, over to Chicago, Wisconsin, Philadelphia, New York, up to the East Coast of Canada, then back down to New York, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia.

Then hitting other countries – UK, Ireland, Belgium, Finland, Romania, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Malta, Lebanon, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Madagascar, Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand. Then back through South America – Brazil, Ecuador then through Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, Mexico to home.

Who’s in for a blog tour? And though the physical thing would take a lot of resources, it is so amazing that this is where I get to travel each time I read something someone has written. This blogging thing is amazing!

(featured photo from Pexels)

Categories

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“Life is full of surprises and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next.” – Condoleeza Rice

When I first started using WordPress, I wasn’t blogging as much as just using it as a place to store a series of posts I was doing on social media as a response to the ugliness of the 2016 election cycle. I put all those posts in a category called antidotetomeanness and didn’t put any thought into categories overall.

Then when I started blogging in earnest, I still didn’t put much thought into categories and generally dumped them in a category called meditation, thinking that would cover almost any pondering on life.

Which is a little shame on me moment because I create information architectures for companies for a living – that is, I help them design the ways to store information that is structured, findable and meaningful for those who need to find it. Of course a lot of people, especially the younger generation, just use search to find things but if things are tagged appropriately we can also create effective navigation to guide people to things we think are most relevant.

But to be fair, I wasn’t sure what I was going to be writing about and wanted to be findable. Now that I have some experience under my belt, I wanted to put some thought into categories and maybe update my navigate to point to things I post about regularly – like my dad’s humor cards and the confidence series I’ve been working on.

I had a few questions:

  1. If I updated a post to change how it’s categorized would it email all my followers to notify them and create an email storm? The answer is thankfully, no.
  2. If I create a parent category like “archive” could I make a menu item for the navigation that would automatically include all the posts that I rearranged to be sub-topics?

Yes! When I created the parent topic, it had 0 posts in the top-level category but still if I navigate to the page for the category, it shows me all the posts that make up the subcategories and I can also add it to the navigation menu if I want to.

3. I wanted to create a menu header for my regularly used topics so that it provided a place for a drop-down menus of my two most common categories: humor and confidence. I ended up created a page for “topics” and then used that to anchor the sub-menu items for my categories:

Once I started to get comfortable with the answers, I had a lot of fun playing around with categories and how they can be useful. It’s opened a whole new level about how I can make things fun and findable on my home page.

Do you use categories? Do you plan them out or just add them as needed?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Coming Together

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“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.” – Gandhi

This weekend my kids and I went to a wedding. As we were going through the receiving line, the bride squatted down so that she could be closer to my 2-year-old son’s level. And when she squatted, he squatted.

As I laughed, I thought about how we mirror the people around us. Neuroscientist David Eagleman, says that who were are is shaped by the five people that we spend the most time with.

But lately the grown-up people I’m spending time with seem to mostly be feeling a general sense of despair about the US and the world. I feel like I’ve hit my saturation point of not being able to take in more bad news.

Then I stumbled on this paragraph from poet Mark Nepo, “I realize that, when things fall apart, they make a lot of noise. When things come together, they do so quietly and slowly. And so, we often miss them. Our culture is obsessed with how things fall apart. The news reports only the noise of things breaking down. The weather is even called Storm Watch. Yet things are constantly coming together, though we have forgotten how to hear them.”

That is when I turn to the WordPress community because unlike the news, I find people writing stories of things coming together all the time. Here are 5 posts that recently gave me joy and delight.

A touching story of kindness from Stuart Perkins of the Storyshucker blog: A Nugget of Kindness | Storyshucker

A researcher joke from the Candid Cerebrations blog: I stole this… – Candid Cerebrations

A beautiful walk through a garden with Rebecca from the Fake Flamenco blog: 5 Local July Flowers ‹ Fake Flamenco

A photographic trip to Venice from Natalie on The Hot Goddess blog – Silent Saturday Solo Sojourn – The Hot Goddess

Camping and Canada Fireworks from the view of a child from Ab and the My Life with T blog – Ignite the Night and Let It Shine – My Life With T

And those are just a few of all the wonderful and creative posts that make me laugh and inspire me.

Thank goodness for all you amazing bloggers that are writing posts about how life comes together. This is what I want to mirror and reflect.

What’s inspiring you this week?

Blogging Around the Coffee Table

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“Fill the paper with the breathings of your heart.” – William Wordsworth

I have a feeling when I blog – both reading and writing – that it’s like having coffee with a group of friends. I get to talk about what is holding my interest these days and I get to hear about what’s going on for other people. The topics are wide-ranging but the lovely part is that there’s space for everyone to share.

My experience differs based on whether I show up to share with my head or my heart.

When I write from my head, it feels as if I’m tussling with my inner critic. I find myself more restless and wanting to rely too heavily on other people’s ideas and words. It feels as if my fingers are encased in bubble-wrap and I have a harder time getting the message across. If I were to name someone I write for when I’m in my head, it’s my mom who is incredibly smart, very literal and a stickler for a solid argument and perfect English grammar.

When I write from my heart, it feels like being in the flow of the stream. I can produce faster when I get out of my own way. It’s not that my head isn’t present – it just has accepted its position to be subordinate to the heart. In that way, I get to the point more quickly, as to the “heart” of the matter. When I’m writing from my heart, I write as if for my dad, the person who is incredibly generous in their desire to understand the point of what I’m saying even if I miss a couple of steps in my argument.

Where do you go, metaphorically speaking, when you write? Do you have a specific person or image that you write for? What does the blogging experience feel like for you?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Milestone Moment

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“The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.” – Walt Disney

I’m celebrating today. I’ve published a post every day for a year. And since late October of last year, I’ve also written a weekly post on the Pointless Overthinking blog as well. That’s about 400 posts total.

Looking back on the experience, I realize that what happened to me over the year was a far different thing than what I thought going into it.

Write What You Need to Read

I was reminded of this adage somewhere in the middle of this year of posts and connected it to what I’m doing here. I’ve been writing what I need to process and remember this precious time that is so busy it could go by without notice. The posts that I imagined I would write – clean, full of poignant phrases, powerfully evocative – are not at all what came out. But what came out was something like little snapshots of learning, appreciating and searching for the depth and richness of life as it is right now.

Themes

I imagined that I would write a lot more about faith and God because this was going to be my meditation journal for parenting. But it turns out that I can’t easily find the words to describe this core but non-denominational factor in my life. I suspect that because my beloved dad had such a definite view of God through Presbyterianism that I imbibed that deep belief but have trouble intellectualizing the faith, hope, and optimism that keep me going.

Instead I find myself writing about friendship, learning, trying, failing, confidence, feelings, the precious lessons I see unfold in my kids, meditation and breathing, imperfection, healing. And though they are all colored by my faith, hope, and optimism, they reflect life as I process it in all its messiness.

Community

I expected that writing posts would help me practice to become a better writer. But I had no idea I was joining a community. In many ways, the beauty of this experience had very little to do with the keyboard and everything to do with finding a network of interesting, inspiring and invested people. Writing blog posts has helped me remember this year of my life – but commenting on them and other people’s post filled a need I didn’t know I had for daily interaction with grown-ups that I wasn’t getting from my professional or family life.

As an example, in the beginning, I had my Gravitar website pointing to an outdated URL. Fortunately, Ab pointed that out to me, I fixed it and we connected. He has commented on every single post of mine since which deserves its own medal. Thank you for that gift, Ab!

That experience multiplied by many including Alegria, Ally, Art, Ashley, Betsy, Caitlyn, Chaya, Claudette, Cristiana, Deb, David, Dr. Stein, Dutch, Endless Weekend, Fred, Gary, Grace, Jane, Julia, Kathy, LaShelle, Mark, Michael, Michelle, Nancy, Natalie, Rebecca, Rosaliene, Susan, Tamara, and so many more is a treasure trove of goodness for which I’m so grateful. Thank you all!

I’m going to go celebrate. See you tomorrow – because even though my experiment is over, somehow I still have more to say… 😊  

(featured photo is of my kids celebrating a few years back)

Data With a Grain of Salt

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“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” – Albert Einstein

Talking with some blogging friends the other day, the topic of blog views came up. We were discussing all the different reasons that view numbers could be less this year than last year: people’s attention spans getting shorter, maybe viewers read more when the pandemic shut down other activities and now they are reading less, etc..

I’m too new to blogging to have enough historical data of significance, but I’ve studied similar data in my professional life to know that numbers aren’t as concrete as we think. So I did some digging and thought I’d share the results of my research specific to WordPress.

First of all – what is a view?

According to the WordPress stats and insights page it is:

“The two main units of traffic measurement are views and visitors:

  • A view is counted when a visitor loads or reloads a page.
  • A visitor is counted when we see a user or browser for the first time in a selected time frame.

A visitor is an individual looking at your site. A visitor can view many different pages of your site or view the same page multiple times. Therefore, the views number is typically higher than the visitors number.”

With those definitions in mind. Here are some things that impact the numbers.

  • If a viewer reads your content in the body of email notification and never clicks on any links within the email, it doesn’t count as a view.
  • If a viewer reads and/or likes your content in the WordPress viewer but does not click through to the full post, it does not count as a view.

One of the blogs that I write for has changed in the last few months so that when posts are emailed out, they no longer have a “like” link at the bottom, just the “comment” link. However posts that come from my blog still have both “like” and “comment” links at the bottom. Some posts are emailed out with just the summary and then something like “click here to read the full post.” For people who are reading blog posts in email like I do, those three differences are going to impact the number of views.

There are some things that WordPress makes a point not to count as a view – search engines and views from anyone that has logged in and who has authoring permissions. Generally speaking, there are trying to report how many views of the content by readers as accurately as they can.

The technology is constantly changing so things like a change in the format of the notifications by email or even how well the WP Reader performs on a mobile device can impact things like view numbers. Numbers as reported within a week are probably pretty accurate in relation to each other because the functionality is consistent. There are likely seasonal differences with dips in summer and holidays. Year over year numbers, comparing the same month this year to the same month last year, is very interesting data but needs to taken with a grain of salt.

If a blog has a drop in views, it’s possible that it’s because the author(s) has alienated the viewers or our collective attention span has gone to seed. But since the trend over time for active bloggers is towards more followers and views, it also might be worth considering these technical factors as well.

For those of you who are interested in more information on the many way people read blog posts from two incredibly talented writers and experienced bloggers, both Ashley and Claudette have covered the topics in depth and by survey here:

Ashley Peterson’s post on How Do You Read Blog Posts? on her Mental Health @ Home blog.

Claudette Labriola’s survey results of How Do You Read Blogs on her Writer of Words, Etc blog

(featured photo from Pexels)

An Honest Mistake

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“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” – Rainier Maria Rilke

I wrote a post for today to celebrate one year of doing a post every day. Then I looked back at my posts to confirm whether it was May 19th or May 18th when I started the practice, I found that I skipped a post on June 11th. Damn! If I hadn’t looked, I could have posted my victory lap and it would have been an honest mistake but once I knew, then I couldn’t celebrate because it became a dishonest mistake.

Not that I think anyone who reads the blog would have noticed. In fact, there could be some followers who wished I skipped more than one day, if you know what I mean… 😉

But somehow it matters to me because I think that if I’m going to go to the effort to write about my life, I might as well be as honest as I can be. I’m sure I have blind spots that keep me from seeing who I am in totality but at the very least I can not believe the BS my brain produces when I see it. Because when I do buy into the fiction, it just wraps one more layer between me and my experience of life that keeps me from feeling the beautiful, joyful, and yes, sometimes gritty reality.

I dated a guy when I was in my early 30’s who was always telling me what a nice guy he was. He’d usually say that as an addendum to a story he’d be relating from work or his first marriage that involved a kerfuffle of some sort. And because he got into a lot of disagreements that related to him needing to be in control or not listening very well, he had to tell me quite often what a nice guy he was. I think he really thought of himself that way but (and this probably goes without saying) I think that he was many things good and bad but objectively speaking, he wasn’t that nice of a guy.

Reflecting on the relevance of this to life, I went looking through Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart to find the section on Places We Go To Self-Assess. There are three definitions offered there:

“Pride: Pride is a feeling of pleasure or celebration related to our accomplishments or efforts.”

“Hubris: Hubris is an inflated sense of one’s own innate abilities that is tied more to the need for dominance than to actual accomplishments.”

“Humility: Humility is openness to new learning combined with a balanced and accurate assessment of our contributions, including our strengths, imperfections, and opportunities for growth.”

I loved that Brené Brown includes that word humility derives from the Latin word meaning groundedness. So I’m practicing humility to try to accurately assess my blogging contribution and opportunities for growth until I actually reach the 365 days of posting. And then I’ll celebrate the milestone with pride, not hubris, I hope!

Anyone else meet a “nice” guy that wasn’t? Or discovered an honest mistake recently?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Confession of a Writer

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“What you are afraid to do is a clear indication of the next thing you need to do.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the year before my dad’s sudden death in a bicycle accident, I had a soul whisper that I needed to get to know my dad on his terms. He was such an enthusiastic supporter of so many people that it was hard to get him to talk about himself. But I sat him down and asked questions and recorded his stories. It was one of the most inspired things I ever did. His death catapulted me into an ambition to write a book about him.  In those months as I was pregnant with my daughter and writing about my dad, spinning between death and birth, I met Sheila, my writing coach.

With her help, I finished and published the book, and after my daughter was born, I found more to write about. When I contacted Sheila again, she asked, “Do you remember the first thing that you said to me?” I didn’t so she reminded me that I had told her I wasn’t a writer, I just wanted to write a book about my dad. But as we worked together, she told me along the way that I would have more to write about.

I think back to how I was so quick to disavow any greater aspirations to be a writer and it showed how much I feared admitting what was calling to me. I didn’t want to presume that I had anything valuable to say (or write) and it wasn’t what I went to school for. In fact, when I was finishing my BS in Electrical Engineering, the last course I needed to complete was a technical writing course, and it took me until after I walked through ceremonies and had a real job to complete those credits and finish my degree.

Sitting down to write and publish blogging posts every morning has been my practice to walk what my inner self already knows is true. That I’m driven to write about this one wild and precious life of mine, to quote Mary Oliver, and that it’s not presumptuous to own that.

I like to think of writing as the last gift that my dad gave me before he departed this planet. And as such it’s the one that helps me integrate him with the life I have now with these two beautiful children. It’s the gift that has brought me depth and wonderful relationships with you all in the WordPress community. To not own that I love writing is a betrayal of all that so I guess I need to call Sheila back up and tell her I’m a writer.

How about you – do you admit that you are a writer?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Influence

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“Be sure to taste your words before you spit them out.” – unknown

I went back to look at footage of an interview with Madonna in 2012 that has stuck in my mind. In the interview, she’s being asked about Lady Gaga’s music and she calls it “reductive.” Something about her facial expression made it stand out when I watched it even though I’m not deep into either of those artists’ work.

When I went back and watched it, I saw a lot of things that I didn’t remember. The ABC News interviewer was really pushing Madonna to say something unkind about Lady Gaga’s music – to weigh in on some perception of “feud” that was being circulated online. Madonna says a number of things about influence and being amused before being pushed to call Born This Way reductive. When the interviewer pushes further to ask what that means, Madonna gets this sassy look on her face and says, “Look it up.”

According to the Oxford Dictionary, it means, “tending to present a subject or problem in a simplified form, especially one viewed as crude.” Setting aside the issue of what we do to celebrities to try to stoke a controversy or conflict, I suspect I’ve always remembered this because I wonder if what we all do is reductive.

Speaking for myself, I think everything I do is derivative or reductive of someone else’s work. I’m endlessly influenced by the books I read, especially the Mark Nepo and Frederick Buechner meditation books that I read every morning before I write. But more than that, I’m influenced by all the posts I read from everyone else and the podcasts I listen to when driving. I try to carefully quote and link when I use material but often times what I get is inspiration or ideas about how to think about a topic.

Celebrity feud aside – isn’t what we are here to do to influence each other? And isn’t that an honor to be a part of someone else’s path? I’m not talking about plagiarism or giving credit where credit is due – but just knowing that our content might touch one other person in a way that is meaningful, isn’t that a good thing?

(featured photo from Pexels)