The other day, I actually wrote two blog posts in a single day. Brian Crosby gently teased me that it was like five years ago with my writing output. And a quick look at my blog stats suggests that I used to blog more often than I used to. Part of it is, when I look deep in the archives, I used to write much shorter pieces. But that’s not all of it. Some of it is that I’m writing longer pieces, some of it has been a decision that I made not to write about edu-news as much as I used to.
But I miss writing. It feels good to sit and write. It is, in the end, a powerful reflective tool – and it’s one I need to carve out the time to do more often.
One of my old English teacher books had some great writing guides for students. One of the ones that sticks with me is simply this – “Ribe Tuckus.” It’s Yiddish (and you wonder why it sticks with me) for “Sit down.” And the instructions for that particular writing guide were simple. You simply sat down with your journal and a pen with no distractions and gave yourself the space to write for 10-20 minutes. If you didn’t write, you didn’t write, but you couldn’t do anything but write or not write for whatever the time allotted. Sometimes, just sitting and doing nothing made the writing come after a while. Sometimes, what came out was amazing, sometimes it wasn’t.
So I’m making a commitment to ribe tuckus more. For me, it comes with some good writing music – jazz or Van Morrison often works – and it comes with a commitment not to flip to all the other browser windows that are open. But I am curious what will come out. And I am curious to know how often that writing will turn into a blog post. I’m not committing to making everything a blog post, as I imagine that some of what I will end up writing about will fall under the category of “Things you cannot blog about,” and I imagine that some days, I might stare at a laptop screen without many words. And I even imagine that some of it may just be writing for me – there’s a crazy thought. But I also do want more of these writing journeys to become blog posts. Writing out loud still matters, I think. And, for me, continuing to push my thinking where others can see it matters.
So… I hope folks find whatever comes next on the blog to be interesting. I hope I have the discipline and energy to actually do this. Writing this blog entry is a way to publicly hold myself accountable to actually doing it. I hope this desire to write more isn’t just because I’ve had a few days of Spring Break to actually power down enough to have the space to write.
But maybe springtime is the right time to launch this idea, after all. Maybe this is the time to come out of blog-hibernation and just ribe tuckus and write.