Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Another obligatory Monday

Apparently no precipitation is expected today. It was one of those days where I woke up and looked at the weather. Today is yet another obligatory Monday. It happens every week and it opens both the door to getting things done and a reminder that the weekend is over. My efforts to write a bunch of prose this weekend did not work out exactly as planned. It seems like in this time of quarantine a lot of time is spent just thinking and sitting. Somehow that thought does not end up translating to the creation of prose. This presents a problematic scenario where investment is occurring into a thought exercise and the outcome is not a string of prose. My efforts to produce increasingly dense and longer strings of prose have been thwarted. That is a problem that can be fixed with a little bit of effort and dedication. It involves being willing to wrestle with the blank page and to keep going until the pose flows across the screen. At a minimum, investing the time to sit down and work on things should be possible. The outcome of that action is what will remain in question. Things will either work out or the grand writing experiment will provide examples of false starts to try to avoid in the future. 

Without a strongly defined research trajectory things tend to move aimlessly. My time has to be devoted to completing something. That something needs to fall within the general research trajectory. Sit down with a piece of paper and start writing down things that need to be solved and then work on a research trajectory that is geared toward solving some of the things that need to be solved. That is pretty much the right way to go about trying to figure out what direction to intellectually take as progress is being made toward a perfect possible future. Maybe that exercise seems a little bit simplistic, but figuring out what direction to take the next step is as important as the action of taking that step. You have to know where you are going and be willing to go to that place. Along the way things will go well and challenges will appear out of nowhere to make things harder than they should be as you take one forward step at a time.

Interrupted. School.


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