Going Tangential

 

   I love school.  I guess that’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching.  I end up learning as much or more than the students and I get to be engaged in the dialogue of the intellect.  It’s a form of exploration. Indiana Jones never found a golden artifact more precious that a student’s dawning realization, a discovery of new terrain, landscapes of life never considered.

   So I went to school-for-a-day last week, a writer’s symposium at the local community college.  A workshop in the morning and one in the afternoon, one from column A, two from … you get the idea.  I took ‘Blogging’ in the morning and ‘Writing from the Dark’ in the afternoon.  The later one spoke to my creative side.  But more about that later.

   The Blogging seminar opened a lot of doors about this endeavor I embarked upon with you all a while ago.  The class led me to look at what I’d been doing with a new eye.  It led me to ask questions of myself in concrete terms ranging from what I call this collection of musings, to what script I use to write.  The interesting thing is that many of the questions it led me to ask were not part of the discussion.  But the discussion going on in the room was only tangential to the discussion going on inside my head.  And my conclusions shared the same vectors.

   So, I’m going to make some changes in the Blog.  If I can actually pull that off without causing a blackout in the northeast corridor, it will be a personal record.  I hope you don’t mind the changes.  Actually, I hope you actually enjoy them.  But probably more to the point, I realized that I need to be going tangential more.  It’s the way I learn best.  And as Joni Mitchell says, “Life is for learning…”