2018: Day 190 the one with builders not repeaters

Dear Reader,

Earlier today I was thinking about potentially starting up a YouTube show that just involves me telling a series of short stories. Yeah — that sounds like an epic idea. It would go beyond a spoken word performance series (not a vlog) and really delivery some non-fiction based short stories. That thought lingered for a few minutes or maybe like an hour or so earlier today. Maybe it is one of those things that could end up coming back. Some thoughts are like ideological boomerangs that end up showing back up to shape the future.

Outside of that I started to think about the nature of how we respect builders not repeaters. That argument is related to creativity not the actual act of physically constructing things. Building toward a new stronger future involves creating. It pretty much involves creating within the moment in new ways all the time. Constantly producing and building new things is much harder than simply repeating the same thing over and over again. Stump speeches are one of the things things that made me think about that. Imagine for a moment the modern chautauqua running daily where the speaker tries to educate people via the same story day in and day out. It would be much harder to continue to evolve and build on the same talk every day. Things change for lectures in the world of higher education, but they do not really change day to day. Professors for the most part deliver relatively stable content year over year in most academic disciplines. Sure some outliers exist where rapid change is ongoing and will continue.

The mundane nature of being a pure repeater is harder than you might expect. Entire novels have questioned the nature of being content without any attempt to striving forward. Maybe it would be easier to become a Luddite and work toward a minimalist existence. Rejecting anything new and simply repeating the same pattern go forward sounds like an awful plan to me. Waking up and following the exact same routine every day might make you feel like you an know what will happen in the future, but the pattern is not really evolving. It is not really changing. For me something would have to give. Something new would have to be interjected into the routine to create a certain degree of chaos to the routine.

You can imagine that based on the title for this blog post that I wanted to write something insightful. It had to be good. It had to be really good. The title alone was enough to pretty much require that level of commitment. Sure it probably fell short of my expectations, but maybe over time the post will grow on me upon further review. Today was one of those days that made me really question things. Outside the weather was very hot. A certain kind of heat that was muggy and oppressive towards the middle of the day. For better or worst that type of heat wore me down enough that I really started to think about the nature of being creative and the nature of giving up any effort to create and just repeating a routine.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado