“Bad blogger! Bad blogger!” is what I’m saying to myself right now. Not in too stern a voice, because overall in my world I am feeling kissed by grace and have much to be thankful for. So I can’t manage to get as annoyed with myself as I usually do over my electronic “scrap habit.” Still, I am a bit irked with myself.
Back in the 80s, I was one of legions of young women who carried a giant purse. (It went well with my tall, puffy, DIY-frosted hairdo and my hot-pink leopard-print headbands and such.) The mega-purse would get filled up with a tangle of various papers and receipts and jewelry and junk, and periodically I’d have to disgorge the purse’s contents onto a table or something to sort things out. Well, friends, I haven’t changed all that much; I just do it with smaller purses (or mini hip packs) now. Therefore nowadays there are natural physical limitations on how far-gone I can let myself get!
Unfortunately, though, I also do an electronic version of that dysfunctional scrap-tangle habit. And the electronic version is a lot less self-correcting, let me tell you! Not only do I have multiple places to store stuff (my favorites are the iphone Note Pad app, Drafts section of this blog, and texts I send myself), but there is pretty much infinite space to store it! Unlike my purse, which (even those gargantuan purses from the 80s) has limitations on space, forcing me to clean them out eventually!
Well, in the spirit of one of my favorite permaculture design principles, I’m going to turn a problem into an asset. Make lemonade from the lemon of my organizational foibles, as it were.
Lemonade part 1: First, I’m sharing this foible openly with you, which I hope will help you feel comfortable with any glitches you have in your own organizational style and creative process. Thus (I hope) helping you in your work.
And lemonade part 2: I’m going to be giving you an unvarnished glimpse of my post-building process itself. This post, expressing my thoughts on tourism, may take awhile, as I try to either find the links from memory, or locate the electronic “scrap box” where I have been saving up all the links for you. You know, the links for the “Further Exploration” section, which I provide with posts on big topics when I feel compelled to share with you more voices than just mine. This sharing of my post-in-progress is also in hopes of helping you feel more comfortable with your own organizational quirks (if you have them), so you can get your creative activities flowing.
Right now, I’m starting from zero-ish. The file “scrap box” for my post “Thoughts On Tourism” is not in the Drafts area of this blog where I thought I had left it. If it’s not in either of my other two favored locations, I will attempt to cobble together the links from memory.
Human memory is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it works better than we expect.
Because, for various reasons, travel and tourism are a very emotional subject for me (a big part of why I let my “blog post gestation period” drag on for so long!), I may start the post by building the Further Exploration section first, and letting that lead me into writing my actual thoughts.
I’ve been “pregnant” with this post now for weeks-turning-into-months! Yikes! It feels great to make this “confessional” post though, and to get started (re)creating the actual post.
I hope you have found this preamble post helpful. We all (well, most of us) procrastinate from time to time, and we all (most of us anyway) misplace our “file folders” from time to time. And probably most of us feel blocked in our self-expression from time to time. I’m happy to be expanding my “bag of tricks” for navigating through those self-created rocky shoals. And I wish you the best in your own navigation, and am here to help you in any way I can.
And I thank you for blessing me with your presence, Dear Reader!