Losing the Good Plates

I bet you thought I'd left the blog to fester and die the death of a thousand bot impressions.

In fact it's been on my mind for the past couple of months, but I haven't been able to write a post because, well ... I like to write about what's on my mind, and what's been on my mind has been engineering a return to Canberra, but that's not really the sort of thing I was comfortable publishing in a public forum where work colleagues and supervisors can see it before we're ready to talk about it.

Now that a secure job has been snared, I can wind up this little blog and draw a nice metaphorical line under it.

Yes, it's a definite end to the "Good Plates" blog. There are a couple of reasons for this.

I started the blog as a way to stretch my writing legs, and it has certainly served that purpose. Along the way I discovered that I wasn't much motivated to write unless I was writing for an immediate audience, which is a bit of a handicap for someone who's trying to work out whether they should be considering writing as a career. So there's one reason.

Another is that this is a blog about this adventure of ours, venturing out of our comfort zone and into deepest, darkest central Victoria. That adventure is coming to an end and so it is logical to me to not keep blogging under this title.

This is not to say I haven't enjoyed putting together these posts.  Looking back over them I'm pretty happy with the thoughts and turns of phrase I've been able to generate, and the positive reaction they've been able to provoke.  One, in particular, keeps coming back to me.  The one in which I referred to some friends who moved away from Canberra, tried to move back and failed, so moved away again.

I know it could seem odd to some people we know, to up sticks and move interstate, for apparently no very good reason, and then to turn around after slightly less than two years and come back. But we feel we've achieved some important things, and that it hasn't been an exercise in futility.

We've confirmed that our hearts are very firmly in Canberra.

We proved to ourselves that we weren't trapped in any place, that we could make a choice, step off that ledge and have an adventure. Not knowing "what could have been" might have been the thing that smothered us in the end. Knowing where we belong now is a more comforting and valuable thing than it could otherwise have been.

The central theme of this blog has been to take advantage of what you have before you and not miss a chance to savour your Sunday best. "Using the good plates" means not letting the things you value most gather dust.

I hope you'll agree that it's worth taking the chance that enjoying the thing you value most might result in losing it.

Hiatus

I'm taking a little break from writing posts for this blog.

Quite aside from a lack of topics to inspire a burst of writing, I still haven't managed to replace this rather unreliable laptop, and the precious few waking hours I have with the family on a typical weekday require my personal attendance.

I'll be back once the muse returns and clears away the excuses.

Moving from "how" to "what"

It's amazing how setting course can make you relax.

Last week I was writing about the tension and frustration of fixating on near-term goals at the expense of mid- or long-term goals.  In the course of that post I referred to my long-term goal of writing an as-yet undefined manuscript of some kind.  However realistic it may be, almost everyone harbours an ambition to write a novel, or to publish something of substance.  In my case I've always felt it to be a little more certain than not, but I've been deterred by two major concerns:

• my writing won't be good enough; and
• my ideas will be hopelessly derivative.

Writing this blog is part of my response to the first point.  Honing my skills and putting my writing in front of an audience seems to me to be a good way to ensure my writing's up to snuff.

If you want to plan a route you need a map

There seem to be very few areas of modern life that remain untouched by goal-setting.

It is with some fondness that I remember the displeasure of the lawyers in one of my first workplaces, when told they had to attend a “love-in” to set organisational and personal goals.  They were suffering the indignity of professionals who feel like they’ve been accused of not knowing what they're doing, and they were acting like a bunch of petulant teenagers.  It would have been cute if they hadn't wasted so much billable time bitching about it.

How things have changed.  These days almost everyone in an office job is compelled to participate in annual performance planning cycles, and while it can be regarded as time-wasting corporate arse-clownery, few now feel that the process calls their expertise into question.  There are also a lot of executives whose mentors attend to personal as well as professional matters.  It’s possible, and acceptable, to set very structured objectives for pretty much anything in your life.

I bring this up because I think the blog has been somewhat adrift over the past week or so, and my problem has to do with planning.