The Next Phase For Productive Flourishing

This is another "making of" post, so if you don't like such things, you probably won't care much for this one. This one is considerably less melancholy than the last one I wrote sometime in April.

Some of you may have noticed that I've been a bit less active here on the blog for the last few weeks. The reasons are two-fold: I went on a ten-day trip to Arkansas to visit my family and I've recently interviewed for a professional position at the University.

We went to Arkansas for so long because we had a few family reunions and wanted to see if living there was an option. It quickly became clear to us that we can't return there - the upside is that it closed doors on possibilities that were once open, and at our phase of life, that's a good thing.

The interview is another matter. For those of you who haven't ever witnessed them, academic interviews are all-day events. The prep work and energy required to make it through them are immense and it takes a few days to recover. But yours truly went in as the underdog for a very prestigious, once-in-a-lifetime position on his first job talk...and was offered the position. I'll almost certainly be accepting it, but I wanted to take the weekend to think about it. Managing the careers of dual academics can be tricky, so Angela and I have taken due diligence to secure positions for her should I take this position.

Sidebar: I've had to force myself to take off for the last few days. This has been an exercise that I hope I'll be able to talk about in the near future. It's hard to force yourself to take off when you love what you do, even though you know you need to do it.

Taking this job will have several effects on what I do here. Initially, I will likely not be able to post as much, as this is a full-time position that requires me to be at the University every day during somewhat set hours. I'm already riding near max capacity as far as working goes, so something has to give a little, and on that short, it will have to be Productive Flourishing. Two posts a week will be my target for a bit.

As things stabilize, though, this blog will likely get much better due to what I'm doing. My job will be to help faculty, staff, and graduate students integrate applied ethics and ethical decision-making into their coursework and research - so I will be doing a lot of thinking and writing about collaboration, creativity, expressing difficult ideas, and (of course) philosophy.

I'll still be dealing with issues of productivity and time management, especially as it becomes harder for me to keep all of my projects going. My research has been lacking for some time now, and it's high time I get back to doing it. Taking this position marks a new phase of my life and some things will have to go to make room for it - so you'll likely see a lot of writing about working through the aspects of your life that are important and integral and those that merely seem important and integral.

(I'll have to warn you: my writing style may become a bit less web-friendly. The style of writing in academia is the standard pyramid, whereas web-friendly writing uses the inverted pyramid model. Check this post out to see why academic writing is harder to read than Internet writing. I'll try to temper that as much as possible, but I can already tell it's going to be difficult.)

The immediate upside as far as this blog is concerned is that I'm now not worried about making any money from it. If it happens, it does, but this blog serves as an additional creative outlet for me and it's something I enjoy doing. If I've helped people in some small measure along the way with anything I've written or created, I'm satisfied - not really needing the money makes it all the better.

One of the things I love about blogs is that they change as you do. They become an electronic manifestation of who you are over time and you can't help but change them while you're going through radical changes.

I'll still be here, doing what I do. I may not be able to do it as much as I have in the past, but I hope you'll walk with me through this next phase of my life. It's only going to get better from here.