Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

More reading and writing

Today could have started off with a review of my notes. A few observations have been squirreled away for coverage at a late time. Right now is not a time for notes or for thinking about things from the past. It is a time for being present right now in the moment. At the moment, I have a cookie and two shots of espresso. That should be enough to produce a solid page of prose. This functional journal is going to need to become a little more observation driven for the next few months. While I’m not going to by any means become a live journal type of writer where my every thought and feeling get put down on paper more things could be written. Throughout the last 132 days I have been trying to write a page of prose at the start of the day. Those words have been targeted from a stream of consciousness that sometimes yields to the production of prose and sometimes does not allow that simple task to be completed. Writing a single page of prose should be relatively easy to achieve. It should be even easier given that any topic could be covered. Maybe that is the underlying problem the totality of the scope being covered makes it harder to sustain. Perhaps focusing on one topic and going for extreme depth of coverage instead of the ongoing breath of coverage would be the best way to go about the daily production of prose. 

It seems like the best path forward toward that perfect possible future is to engage in more reading and writing on a daily basis. My bookshelves contain hundreds of books that could be consumed again from a slightly different perspective. My views on things are more refined and probably a little less interesting than 20 years ago when a lot of the books behind me were purchased from university bookstores. It would be pretty easy to just start reading from one side of a shelf and just enjoy the intellectual ride across a ton of different authors and subjects. 

I jotted down 3 book titles that should be on my shelf, but have not been written:

  1. Observing civility in America: Being a citizen of history
  2. The American Citizen: Civil society and being a citizen of history
  3. Community in America: Understanding place, interest, and circumstance

At the moment, I’m in one of those modes where I could probably write down 25 titles of books that should be written. Some of that energy should be used to write the outline and maybe a chapter or two of one of them, but that seems unlikely to happen at the moment. Something tells me interruptions are about to abound this morning. Having the time to simply sit and write in my office is a luxury beyond the time that I have today.


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