I have wanted to write here more and even podcast again for some time. I have struggled with motivation and practice so that my results have been inconsistent. I have an idea I want to explain and try out to see if it helps. I wish to make a vow but not about writing or recording here more. That isn't a very good promise to make, I already tried that in any number of forms with little success. I started thinking about what sort of devotion to pursue that would incidentally lead me to write and record more. I think I know what I want to vow and want to explain how I figured it out.
My vow simply is that I will work to understand my profession and the industry it is a part of in order to help myself cope with the changes over the last few years and that are still unfolding. There are some hopes that go with the promise and I'll explain why they aren't part of the vow itself.
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I started exploring what I learned from an interview with Guo Gu, a teacher of Chan Buddhism, in my meditation practice. I have been cultivating equanimity as a centering focus. Chan seems to favor what he called contentment, expressed with the phase, "It's all good". To me, I thought that could be a blending of the stable abodes, a bit each of equanimity, loving kindness, compassion, and vicarious joy. I am also drawn to what he called the junctures of life, opportunities to practice as we live our lives. This is a focus of my study and practice right now, expanding the work I do meditating into the rest of my life.
I bought a copy of Guo Gu's The Essence of Chan and started reading it. I have not practiced reading for curiosity as much as I used to. I am remembering how the more I practice, the more motivation I have to practice.
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This week I reached the finish line of a project I've been working on for my $dayjob for a little over a year. I've worked on a handful of projects like this in my career, few of them were successful. I thought writing about my experience would help consolidate what I've learned. I've been wanting to write more. My strongest inspiration over the years has been my own experience. Reflecting on this project I recognize a handful of topics I could write about from personal, team, and department perspectives. Writing about what I went through, witnessed, and learned will complement the preparation I did before starting this project.
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A year ago I was burning out. I had been on the edge of burnout for several years. When I left that job, a very chaotic early startup that hid its dysfunctions better than most, I consciously worked on processing the experience, restoring my well being, and preparing for my next steps more thoroughly than I have ever done so before. As a result, I am ending this year feeling far better than I started. I am especially surprised since it seems like much in this world has continued declining and at a worryingly faster pace.
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Cory wrote another post at Pluralistic that resonated with some of my own recent thoughts. He was exploring the intersection of the creative urge with the increasingly exploitative intermediaries standing between creators and their potential audiences. Well worth a read on its own if you are interested in any of these topics. One thing he admitted in particular stood out to me, that like may creators, he would still write even if he wasn't compensated for it.
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After reading yesterday's Pluralistic, I realized a few parallels with Cory's reflection on the past three years of his current web-writing setup. I've experimented with many similar tools and concepts. I'm inspired to take that experimentation back up and reminded that writing for myself, however rough it ends up, is still worthwhile. More interestingly I realized that how I read the web has evolved in similar ways to Cory's writing.
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I continue to work on this site, either migrating old content or re-writing it to be more up to date.
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I have been self hosting my own services for years. I originally started doing so to practice new skills early in my career, then increasingly for privacy by definitively owning my own data. Since I started I have added more services to enrich and control my online experience. I recently overhauled and upgraded how I self host after a few years of inertia. I am pretty happy with where my efforts led and thought I'd share a little more about what I did.
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You may have noticed more content showing up here on the new site. Some of it, like this post, is new, part of my effort to get back into regular posts. The rest is content from the old site that I have started migrating over to the new site.
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