Is slow blogging oxymoronic?
It’s probably just me, but I get the impression that this blogging thing is about writing regularly. I am fine with regularity. I play golf regularly: about once every fifteen years. I think you could call me a slow golfer.
One thing I learned about golf is that taking large chunks out of the course is considered bad form. There are those that believe one can improve with practice. I was brought up by two golf-addicted parents. My revenge is a story about golf.
If I am not mistaken, the idea is to post to a blog often. Now “often” means different things to different people. I’ve been reading Slow Leadership. For someone that is writing about slow, Carmine Coyote, the blog’s author, must be going at a fair clip.
I think he is talking to those that want to slow down, yet still work inside the corporate machine. I wonder if it is possible. During the dot.com boom, I met a number of otherwise functioning and intelligent adults who were proud of the long hours they worked. They were proud that they had a mobile phone clipped to their belts. Who knows, they might be summoned at any minute to dispense vital expertise of a critical nature. They even enjoyed complaining about their lot. So people are different.
Now, I’m no Einstein. In fact, I can be mind-bogglingly dim. But I do know that Einstein spent a lot of time with his feet up on the desk staring out of the window of his Princeton office. That impresses me. And what’s more, he didn’t have a neat desk.
I was browsing around in a book shop the other day and came across a perfect mess. (A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamon and David Freedman.) It’s my kind of book.
At the beginning of chapter one there is a lovely quote by Einstein, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?”
In a nutshell, the book is about the benefit of flexibility over rigidity. The authors lambaste the hot new profession of organizer. They say that the time spent getting your home-garage-office in order outweighs the time spent looking for things.
Now, I spend a fair amount of time looking for things. It’s one of life’s adventures. As long as you’re not in a hurry you can embark on a journey of discovery. And this afternoon, when looking for my glasses, I discovered a bill I needed to have paid. Disorder works!