A Tale of Two Blogs

I've had three longer-running blogs in my adulthood, of which this one is the most recent. Last year it made sense to me to have two active blogs: my older one, torthuiljourney.blogspot.com, which mainly focuses on family, and this one. I was trying to redefine myself and my online life, and the way it made sense to me was that torthuiljourney would be like a diary, and torthuilexplores would be a place to explore ideas, which specifically might take me in a different direction than the older blog, and outside the expectations of whatever audience I had built. Or put a different way, one blog would be about exploring ideas, and the other would be how I implement them in my life.

Lately it feels a bit redundant to have two blogs, as what I want to talk about could fit easily on either, and I find myself not worrying much at all for being judged for exploring ideas (Why should I stress over that? this is about me doing the best for myself and my family.) So more so than previously I've found myself duplicating, or almost duplicating posts. I think this is a good sign, as it shows that I am living out the ideas I am considering. There isn't my 'real life' and my 'life of the mind,' or not as much. There is.....Life!

I will keep the two blogs for now. There is still a lot of unique content on each. But they are not strictly divided in my mind, and I don't see the reason for anyone to read one and definitely not the other.

With that in mind, here is a link to my (developing) thoughts on a very special recent experience.

Yellow and Blue

I shared this one on torthuiljourney as it is about my family, but it easily fits here too because I try to process my thoughts on belonging to a cultural community and to the the war in Ukraine.

Are we all just winging it

Diana shared this quote by Oliver Burkeman , and it got me thinking so I wrote out my thoughts (below).

NOBODY REALLY KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING: “I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time. Growing up, I assumed that the newspaper on the breakfast table must be assembled by people who truly knew what they were doing; then I got a job at a newspaper. Unconsciously, I transferred my assumptions of competence elsewhere, including to people who worked in government.

But then I got to know a few people who did—and who would admit, after a couple of drinks, that their jobs involved staggering from crisis to crisis, inventing plausible-sounding policies in the backs of cars en route to the press conferences at which those policies had to be announced. Even then, I found myself assuming that this might all be explained as a manifestation of the perverse pride that British people sometimes take in being shamblingly mediocre. Then I moved to America—where, it turns out, everyone is winging it, too. Political developments in the years since have only made it clearer that the people ‘in charge’ have no more command over world events than the rest of us do.

It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment: if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution. It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.”—Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021)

My thoughts:

What, it’s not just me always winging it? 😆 that’s a relief…..sort of….lol.

I think based on my experience I agree though. Any experience I’ve had with any organization, over time has shown me how difficult it is to keep those organizations going. Any sort of consistency, authority, accountability is built gradually over time, and is mostly a matter of convention and tradition: “We will hold you to this standard because we have been holding people to this standard for a long time.”

Covid-19 of course disrupted typical ways of doing things. This was in one sense a good thing because it made space for finding new ways to do things. As a teacher the early days of lockdown were amazing for my professional development. I learned and innovated more in 4 months than I had in 5 years at least. Teachers were working together more closely because we were all equally discombobulated. Many students struggled with the new ways of doing things, but not just a few thrived as well. It was exhausting, liberating, stimulating, and even fun.

But…as the disruptions continued, and inequities emerged, it became apparent how difficult it is to maintain consistency, authority and confidence in the system. I have mostly good relationships with my students, so our immediate environment is pretty good, but how do I speak with authority when someone above me can (often seemingly arbitrarily) completely up end our reality? You must come to school….no you shouldn’t….exams are on….no they aren’t! (At least that one doesn’t affect special Ed)….This assignment is super important and you should make your best effort….or not because you have to learn from home and it can’t be properly completed there…Here is this great instant messaging app that we can use to communicate efficiently.....but now people are abusing it, sending inappropriate rants, demanding we stop everything during the school day to respond to them RIGHT NOW.....well you get the idea. Without consistency and tradition, our institutions are exposed as collections of persons just winging it.  And it becomes difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt, to believe in their coherence. This is true even if in the moment, the people inside those institutions are genuinely doing their best and trying to do things better than they've always been done before. And often succeeding!

It’s a crazy ride alright.