works of wanderlust

Tag: december-ish

  • Another Life Reset

    Nearly every day for the last year this blog has given me space to think about and write about living a more simple, purposeful life.

    Better food.

    Longer walks.

    Moments of captured creativity.

    But so what’s my point?

    Who or what are you
    leaving behind in 2021?

    I guess getting to the end of a year of being someone who works in digital technology but plays in the very analog world of cast iron, fire, wilderness, and trails has found me at a bit of a crossroads.

    I turned forty-five this past month.

    I’ve been working at a post-university career-type job for a little over twenty-some years.

    I suppose (and if I’m lucky) I could expect to work for a little over twenty-some years until I’m supposed to retire and pack up my suitcase to see the world as an old guy.

    But all this thinking and writing and pondering a different sort of life has left me with a particular notion of switching things up.

    I seriously looked into finding a bakery apprenticeship (or something similar) over the summer. It didn’t work out, but it did put me in the mindset of what exactly might be encompassed in a career change, even one massively dramatic as moving from a keyboard to a cutting board.

    So while I’m lucky in another way in that we didn’t lose anyone close to us this year (despite a global pandemic raging everywhere we look) I did lose a piece of me, a particular certainty of myself and who I am, and not necessarily in a bad way.

    What am I leaving behind in 2021? I’m stepping away from the resolute and stubborn guy who knows exactly where he’s going to be sitting in twenty some years. I don’t think I do anymore. I think he faded away sometime over the summer and in his place is someone who wants … needs … a simpler bite of meaning in his life.

    Whether that’s a result of all this writing, or just an obvious correlation, I’m not sure yet.

  • A Good Life, Well-lived & Enjoyed Aloud

    As I write these words the final month of the first year of this blog has arrived.

    It’s December.

    And after a mind-numbing and depressing 2020 I’ve been penning my thoughts and opinions here throughout 2021 to the tune of one hundred and seven thousand, three hundred and eighty three previously published words into two hundred and fifty three posts inside this digital space.

    It’s been exactly eleven months as of today.

    Deep breath.

    Describe your 2021
    in tech or tools.

    I’ve been blogging for over twenty years.

    Unless you’ve cracked through my obfuscation of identity curtained across these words (hidden mostly because I work in an industry and culture where Google search results for my real name are akin to a business card and I like to keep my personal and professional selves separated) you are unlikely to know that while I’ve only been writing here for eleven months, I’ve previously managed a string of previous personal, creative, and niche websites over the past twenty-ish years. I’ve got a bit of secret tech cred. But just a bit.

    In almost all those websites, December uniformly has become a time of self-refection and mindset adjustment for the upcoming year.

    So, after eleven months of scattershot posting here about cooking, adventure, firepits, travel, sketching and all those other little analog and outdoor enjoyments, I’ve once again set December aside for a string of thirty one posts about … well … cooking, adventure, firepits, travel, sketching, and all similar sort of those things, but in the context of the past, present and future.

    Call it a quasi-resolution-twist to wrap up the year with a bit of grace and style.

    Because routine and tradition can be a good thing, even in technology where we seem to think we want fresh and innovative turned on like a firehose.

    My 2021 was a technology reset year.

    This year I came back to a pattern of regular writing in (and this is important) a space I fully control. We take that for granted because so many of us cede that control to the social media algorithms of big private media platforms, offloading the decision-making to money-generating, click-baiting software systems that slurp up our creative effort and spill it out to the rest of the world in a way that usually makes other people rich and famous. I was tired of shipping my photographs and art and writing off to the likes of Facebook and Reddit and crossing my fingers that an invisible software system saw fit to give it some daylight online before it disappeared into a vast, bottomless pit of old posts.

    I may not have yet obtained the same quantity of folks reading what I choose to put online, but I think the quality of what I choose to curate here has elevated the whole experience for me … and hopefully anyone who chooses to join me here.

    I’ve all but vacated those controversial social platforms, maintaining a minimal presence, and definitely not a preferential one.

    This blog was my 2021 experiment, and the experiment was a success. Dozens of you read it and check in. And tho my daughter would scoff at that number saying “dad, such and such a youtube streamer has six million subscribers and makes more money that you do at your real job!” I would retort that I’m giddily loving entertaining any size of small crowd with genuine content that makes me as happy writing it as I hope it makes others reading it.

    In other words, the experiment will most definitely continue into 2022 and beyond.