Moving blog from Wordpress to Bear: feeling grind-iness in hindsight
I've been moving all of my blog posts from Wordpress over here to Bear. The move is making me feel lighter. An analogy I thought of was that it's like taking a box of mementos from a house with habits and baggage attached to it and moving it into a new home.
I'm having some big feelings while moving the posts. I am clicking off, into a new tab, very often. One thing I am feeling, like an echo, is that I am re-feeling the grind-iness I felt when labouring over several of the posts. For example, the articles I wrote on tsetse flies, and those on geology topics.* By grind-iness, I mean I didn't feel flow or ease. The process wasn't fun. In hindsight and with the benefit of more life experience, I can see what I didn't realize then: that everything worthwhile does take effort, but that it's important to uncover whether the thing feels good, at least some of the time that you are doing it. If it doesn't, that's an important piece of data that might indicate you (and the world) are better served by finding something else that does.
I feel sad when I think back on these times. I wonder if I stuck with the grind-iness because I was so used to not feeling flow or ease that I didn't know there was something better out there.
I chose the word "grind-iness" (not a real word) because when I was thinking about these old blog posts, I thought of Sasha Chapin's anti-grinding principle. How I use the word is different than how he uses it, but both of us are pointing to the value of changing course when things don't flow, rather than always grinding through.
*I am publishing this post before I have moved all the old posts, so I can't link to those examples just yet.