waybigsky.me

I’m currently (been currently for about a year now) working on putting together a website to discuss matters of thinking and belief.

While I kick the tires on the CMS I’m using, as thoughts come to mind I’m also finding occasion to make some blog entries discussing matters that I want to the site to speak about. (I’m told that when building a site, it’s actually best to add content, then figure out some of the rest – theming (WordPress spellcheck tells me “theming” isn’t a word – how does WordPress not know what theming is?), navigation, etc. – once you have a clearer sense of what the site will actually be about.) [I've already managed to digress twice before I even get to my thesis.] Just now, I’ve been working on a blog entry describing my motivations for creating this site and, for a brief entry, I’ve found myself having more difficulty that I’d like trying to capture it. Last Monday, I spent over an hour, I think, working out another blog entry regarding a book I was looking at, and went back a couple of times later to iron it out more – and I know it’s still not what I want yet.

One of the challenges for me as I write is trying to map out the overarching premise as I work on capturing specific thoughts which I’m wanting to include. Writing is every bit the mental cloud exercise that I expect (and dread) it to be. I’ll get some kind of articulation out, and then as I go on, I’ll catch the sense of that thought differently (better?), and then have to figure out how and where to join the two articulations. Sometimes, where I’m going with an articulation seems to not fit anywhere, and I have to work on bridging narrative to find it a place somewhere while still keeping the rest of the train of thought intact.

I suppose that’s what writing is for everyone, but I haven’t really written anything in years, so I find the exercise more challenging than I wish it would be.

Mondays are my introvert-imposed quiet nights, where everyone in my household “gets” to experience what life without devices that have speakers (except headphones) looks like. I am exceedingly wired for language – consequently I find myself mentally incapable of tuning out words coming from a box that is anywhere within earshot. So, I need nights without electronic words in order to get a mental toehold on big picture concepts I’m wanting to process, looking to get enough focus and direction so that I can carry what momentum I’ve picked up through the rest of the week. I’m hoping that maybe writing practice on quiet night will give me the toehold I need to be more effective at my concentration even with ambient noise distraction present.

I know this is mostly just rambling, but I’m wanting to get something down on the page…

Announcement: This is my “Hello World” entry, so of necessity it has to be both ambitious and fragmented.

For several years, I’ve been trying to sift through just who I am, trying to discern a bearing for how I function, how I think, what I really want to pour my energies into. I don’t have it figured out yet, but I’ve finally (so I claim) reached the point where I’m ready to leap and be out there in some substantive way.

The one discovery that I’ve made that has made so much of how I function make sense to me is that I am an Introvert. I first had that brought to my attention through an MBTI instrument I took in 2007, but it has taken a couple more years for me to grasp what that means and how completely I am an Introvert.

For instance, I’ve known for many years that I do my best processing when I do some initial research on a subject, taking in a lot of information – and then just set it all down and leave my id (or whatever) to sift through it and map things out for me. I’ve also known that my productivity and effectiveness is dramatically reduced if I’m interrupted frequently. Turns out these are classic Introvert traits. (I can even go back to when I was in high school and recognize that trend in my learning (particularly in math). I managed well enough, but I remember that I had a better grasp on concepts I studied weeks ago than I did with the content at hand.) There’s a lot of how I handled situations growing up – both really well and really badly – that I get now, and see how I might have approached things differently if I had understood how I worked. (I say this only as an observation, not to excuse unkindnesses that I’ve done.) I also understand my Dad more now than I did while he was alive.

I suppose it’s important to me to set that out first, almost central to the challenge I’m wrestling with is that Introverts – by and large – have a compulsive need to think things through before we are ready to put foot forward with something. That’s not in and of itself bad – in fact, applied well that’s one of our strengths. However, it does promote analysis paralysis, and Introverts are prone to miss the cues that say “it’s time, get going already”.

So, what does that have to do with journeying vs. navigating? For me, at least, Introversion has looked like observing and often assimilating as I go. Specifically, I want to follow a path to see where it goes; more specifically, I want to not impose my own ideas on where the path wanders, but to let the path itself be the revealer of the journey. Really, it’s trying to live in a romantic state of mind for living life (where everything just happens as it’s supposed to). However, after many years, I’ve finally grasped that such a decision making paradigm ultimately leads nowhere! or at least not where I’m really wanting to go.

That takes navigation. Which means being willing to set course and intend to get somewhere particular.

The struggle is that setting a course to one place means letting go of opportunities to go other places. Rather than try to reframe here, I’m going to reference a comment I made on a compatriot Introvert’s blog, that of David Seah. To best get the sense of where I was coming from, and to see some of the similar wrestlings that he goes through, I would highly suggest reading through his original post, and then see how I thought my own perspective added to the conversation. [More broadly, I would highly recommend tuning in to David's site. He does all manner of thinking out loud as he works out ways to be more effective with his efforts. I first learned of him through the Printable CEO firms he's made available on the site, and have been following him for several years.]

In this comment I reference, I articulate a view on journeying versus navigating, particularly looking at the costs of choosing navigating – plus a glimpse of the part of me that really is not ready to let opportunities go.

However, I’ve reached the point where I’m needing more to be heading somewhere than I’m needing to hang on to options. That’s the navigation that I’m looking to initiate here.