At some point yesterday I was talking to a friend who was doing the 22 press-ups for 22 days challenge (raising awareness about the rates of suicide and mental health issues in veterans). I was conscious that I had started this 30-day challenge and was approaching my 4th day in a row without blogging and was wondering about similarities in the situations. Both are challenges that are out there in the public domain, although potentially Facebook (in which the press-up challenge exists) is a very different social environment with different rules and expectations for people’s behaviours (it’s interesting that so far in this making my work visible experiment I have not yet posted anything about it on Facebook, preferring twitter – probably ought to come back to that at some point). But there is a key difference in that the press-up challenge is underwritten by the idea of doing something in an altruistic vein with added peer/ group pressure – if the act itself is not directly selfless it is a demonstration of thinking about and raising awareness of the needs and experiences of others.
Conversely this challenge is only about and for myself – it’s all about me, me, me – developing my practice about putting myself and my work out there, ultimately with the desire to build better and more generous collaborations and relationships, but it’s still about me and my role and wants. So when I kinda semi-subconsciously thought (i.e. the thought crept in but I didn’t hold onto it) about just not blogging again and pretending like it never happened on Monday it didn’t really feel like it would matter because who would notice or be bothered anyway. These particular thoughts are not changing the face of humankind!
But someday I might have a thought or an idea that could change, if not the future of the planet, something for someone(s) – in fact I’m more than confident that I know a heap of stuff already that can indeed do that. So in a crisis of confidence about ‘failing’ to enact a new habit from the exact start I have decided on the best course being honesty about the fact that developing habits is not easy or straightforward. For the last 4 days the obstacles have been: making time (I can be a bit of a weekend ‘checker-outer’, it’s a skill I hold dear); some crisis of purpose on the exercise; and fear of forcing myself to ship something when I’m not sure exactly what to write or how it will come across. So I’m just forcing myself now to put that out there.
The other issue was that I was not sure that I had done any thinking about economics, which allegedly is the current purpose of my blogging! That turns out not to be strictly true – many inevitable discussions about the Olympics have provoked discussion of the ‘value’ of the event, and reminded me that in 2015 I read the well researched book by Andrew Zimbalist, ‘Circus Maximus: The economic gamble behind hosting the olympics and the world cup’ – with interesting lessons for reform of these movements so we can focus wholeheartedly on the achievements of the athletes.
Which just reinforces my view that economics is really part of everything in our lives.
nicobobinus 