Housekeeping

What is this blog about? Well, "Life the universe and everything", just like the caption says. But I have to admit it - over time it has become a disorganised mess, and claiming that it's written by a renaissance soul with multiple interests isn't going to solve the problem. It's difficult to promote a blog if you can't tell people what to expect when they visit.

So over the past week I've been moving most of my articles on Christian topics to a new blog, Rumours of Hope. Now I'm working on re-organising and refocusing what's left here, still with a Christian slant, but without the long articles on theology, Bible reading etc. More of that later. 

In the meantime, I hope you will visit Rumours of Hope and tell me what you think. If you find any dead links or other glitches, please tell me about those too.

Tuesday tips

When I first decided to write as a 'renaissance soul' and take a different theme for each day of the week, I thought that the Tuesday Tips posts would be the easiest and most fun to write. It would just be a case of looking around the house, or through my bookmarked "how to" pages, and choosing something to write about. Next time someone said "That's a good idea, why didn't I think of that?" I'd turn the idea into a blog post. Simple.

The trouble is, what seems like a brilliant idea to one person seems blindingly obvious to another. And who really wants to know that I clean my bath with bicarb soda, or that I keep all my hard-to-remember online passwords organised with Lastpass? Maybe I'm the last person on earth to discover that a regular flat white coffee can contain over 200 calories, and I'll just look foolish telling everyone about it.

Which is why, so far, the Tuesday Tips hasn't happened. Maybe next week I'll discover something worth sharing.

Renaissance soul or dabbler?

(Monday Musings)

Once you discover your passion, we're told, everything else will fall into place, whether it’s your career, your ministry, your blog or your purpose in life. Knowing what motivates and inspires you at the deepest level will enable you to achieve great things and experience boundless joy and satisfaction. You’ll be in harmony with the universe/God/your inner being. Or something like that.

But what if you have many passions? Or serial passions? What if your greatest passion seems to change from one week to the next? The usual response is “You just haven’t looked hard enough. You’ll know it when you find it.”

Career counsellor Barbara Sher has a different answer. In a book titled “Refuse to Choose” she describes what she calls ‘scanners’. Scanners are people who have multiple interests and gifts. Their ‘passion’ is discovering new things, mastering new skills. They tend to move from one career to another, one hobby to another, or cycle through a long list of obsessions. Being called to settle for just one thing, either as a career choice, a life purpose or a spare time activity, produces acute anxiety.

Margaret Lobenstine refers to these people as Renaissance Souls. She likens them to Leonardo da Vinci, who turned his mind to a multitude of interests and seldom finished anything. As someone who is heading for retirement still trying to decide what to do when I grow up, and wondering if I’ll live long enough to read all the books on my reading list and finish all the projects in my cupboard, I like the idea of being a Renaissance Soul. No-one wants to be known as a dabbler, and 'scanner' sounds too much like a useful but boring piece of technology. But Renaissance Soul will do for me.

However, being a Renaissance Soul makes for a messy blog. Just looking at the tags on the left suggests I can’t make up my mind about what the purpose of this blog should be. What do advertising, the Trinity and the Hubble telescope have in common? Having no real focus makes it difficult to decide what to write. So I’m going to try to be a little more disciplined, and focus on one main area for each day of the week. Monday is for musings, Tuesday for tips, Wednesday for …. well, if I get that far you’ll see.

photo by Bert Kauffman on Flickr

Fools rush in...

I'm not usually keen on making New Year’s resolutions. What’s so significant about the calendar changing from Friday December 31st, 2010 to Saturday January 1st, 2011? Numerous other dates in our lives mark the beginning of a new year - birthdays, the school year, Easter, the new tax year, wedding anniversaries, advent. They all provide equally good reasons for looking at life and making plans to change what needs changing.

Nevertheless, once the busyness of Christmas is over, there is a lull in my life which lends itself to reassessing what I’ve been doing and where I’m going. January brings several public holidays, the days are long and hot and not conducive to being active, and there’s little going on in the church outside the Sunday morning service. It seems a good time to sit down and think and plan.

I’ve been thinking for quite a while about getting back into blogging. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve given more thought to what I actually want to achieve, who I’m writing for and what I should write about. I've also tried to understand why it is that as soon as I start to write, I lose my nerve and think “What could I say that hasn’t been said better a thousand times before?” It’s a question I haven’t fully resolved, but since no-one is forced to read what I’m writing, perhaps I should leave it to the reader to decide.

One of the things I’ve learned over the past few years is that the only way my plans will happen is if I put them as concrete tasks on the calendar. Otherwise they become wishful thinking. Using an online calendar like Google’s is a boon because it can be set up to send me reminders by email. I'm less likely to forget to check my email than I am to check the calendar.

And so, on January 3rd, I received an email that said “Make a list of ideas for blogging”. It was surprisingly easy to come up with ideas once I started. I now have a list of topics ranging from shopping to self-help books, sex to the sacraments. If I don’t get overwhelmed by the possibilities, it should keep me blogging for a while. (They don't all begin with 's', I hasten to add.)

Back again

It's a long time since I've done any writing for publication, as you'll see from the dates on my previous posts. Blogging seems a good way to move from merely personal ramblings secreted on my laptop to something more out there. Blogs only work, I'm told, if you post regularly, so blogging could also provide the incentive I need to keep writing.
At first I considered scrapping or archiving my previous blog ("Christian Freedom") altogether and starting a new one. I wanted to broaden what I could write about. Instead I changed the template, changed the colours, even changed the title to something a little less formal and formidable.
I discovered after choosing the title that it's the name of a song by Alanis Morissette but I didn't have the song in mind. And I definitely didn't have that doctor in mind. But linking one thing to another is what the internet is all about, so if you can see any connection between the three, let me know.