Colin Wright's Blog, page 7

Coiling and Uncoiling

For the past few years, I’ve been spring-coiling.

That’s how I think of it, anyway: a focused process of assessing, experimenting, consolidating, retracting, refurbishing, replacing, upgrading, upskilling, scanning my personal, interpersonal, and professional horizons, and generally questioning every aspect of who I am, what I’m doing, and where I’d like to be as a next-step version of myself.

This stage, this state, isn’t unfamiliar territory; I’ve gone through this process more times tha...

Cause-Orientation

When you’re cause-oriented—there’s something you care deeply about and you’ve committed part of yourself, your life, to it—it’s normal and understandable that you might wring yourself out in support of that cause on a semi-regular basis.

You believe in this mission, this ideal, so when variables shift, opportunities arise, or conflicts brew, you realign your life so you can throw more time, energy, and resources at this most-vital undertaking.

The unfortunate consequence of such a pivot is...

The Work Itself

I’ve had a similar conversation with maybe a half-dozen people recently, about how “work”—in the sense of doing what one does to make a living, and especially creative work—has slowly grown in definitional scope to encompass things well beyond the work itself.

It’s possible, if you’ve already become a well-known entity, to make a living just writing, just painting, just making music or food or whatever else. You have a name and probably other people to handle the other stuff for you.

But f...

Expand and Contract

As someone who typically travels quite a lot, it’s important to me to have comfortable, sustainable inflated and deflated modes of operation.

This means having a sense of what goes where in my bag, what I wear for which travel scenarios (for smooth passage through checkpoints and TSA screenings, for various weather conditions and social settings), and how I get my work done if the WiFi isn’t good, if it’s noisy and I need to record something, and if my attention is pulled in a million differe...

Fluffy and Foundational

I’ve historically experienced a significant shift in my lifestyle, priorities, and thinking every seven years or so.

Based on that schedule, I’m likely to see another such shift around a year from now.

Between these fairly radical recalibrations, I tend to undertake minor to moderate situational and orientational renovations every few months.

At the base of these lower-grade overhauls are what I think of as interior purpose statements: journal entries, basically, but focused on how I’d ...

Tools

When I’m learning something new and looking to veteran practitioners of that field, study, or craft to see how they do things, I almost always find they’re less fixated on gear than newbies and middling-range practitioners.

Instead, they tend to concern themselves with how they use the tools they’ve got, and how they might accomplish what they want to accomplish with what they have at hand.

This isn’t universal, and there are many cases in which a next-step in one’s development as a chef o...

Grief

We grieve we when lose someone, but we also grieve when we lose a sense of place or time or self, a path we feel we’re walking (toward something important), or a reliable-seeming understanding of how the world works.

A lot of us have lost things over the past few years.

Many more before that, too, of course, but since 2020 it’s seemed like one massive everything-overhaul after another: a global pandemic, geopolitical strife, military conflict, famine, mass shootings, climate-related tumult...

Probably Don’t

Social media is great for some purposes, but much of what the networks (or rather, the people running and managing them) want from me is not aligned with my priorities.

I don’t want to post more stuff, more aggressively.

I don’t want to share every aspect of my life.

I don’t want to “pivot to video.”

I don’t want to stay glued to my screen all day, every day.

I don’t want to “create more content” for their platform so they can monetarily benefit from my (free) labor.

There are ...

Purpose

As a general policy, I try to do things purposefully rather than passively.

“Purposeful” can mean different things, though, depending on what aspect of life we’re talking about.

Exercising each morning is purposeful in that I hope to remain fit and healthy, but it’s also purposeful in that it feels good, is difficult enough that I derive a sense of satisfaction from completing my routine, and in that it adds a nice bit of structure to my day.

Writing is purposeful for me in that I deriv...

Who Where How

I’ve got a birthday coming up this weekend: I’ll be 37-years-old.

Part of me believes I should mark the occasion with chin-stroking, navel-gazing, and other ponder-related pastimes; that the day should serve as a neon sign and full-stop on my calendar.

Another part of me argues that this is just an arbitrary date tucked in amongst all other arbitrary dates. I needn’t take much notice—beyond maybe eating some kind of cake?—and breezing on past (as I typically do with birthdays) is more idea...