Why I Relaunched the Blog

With determination, I launched a blog in 2016. I published 8 posts between January and August. And then I stopped.

Life got busy. I changed jobs and wanted to devote all my time and energy to it. I'm a father of young children. A husband. I was becoming more involved in a couple of organizations outside of work.

I didn't want to choose not to write, but I did.

Four years later, I can say that not writing has eaten at my soul. I don't know where the compulsion to write comes from, I just know it's always there.

I suspect you know what I’m talking about. Maybe it isn’t writing, but it’s something: painting, going to culinary school, climbing a mountain.

During a grad school project in 2007, I was struck by the insight that we need to go inside the mind and pursue the unseen in order to influence the seen. I call this pursuit Hopewalking.

Years later, I am even more convicted. We are creatures destined to create: art, software, gardens, experiences, tools, ad infinitum.

But on the individual level what we should personally work on isn't obvious. Nor is there a template to work out how we should spend our time vocationally. Worse, choosing something doesn't mean we will succeed at it.

The right thing to work on comes from an unseen place, and I would argue a spiritual place, a place beyond us.

I write because I want to understand this, and I want to explain it.

Not incorporating the unseen is an urgent problem.

If we aren't paying attention, the unseen limits us to something smaller than we can be, causing pain, frustration, and depriving others of what we can offer them.

You have endless leisure tools available to you beyond anything that anyone in any era has ever experienced. For an hour or two of average wages, you can earn access to thousands of hours of richly produced film and television programming on demand. Your home is cooled and heated to your ideal temperature. You can thoroughly enjoy the time spent doing nothing.

This has happened to me. It is happening to millions of people every day. Those people are taken out of the game. I want to learn to pay better attention, to not go down that path, and to help others find their way out.

The unseen plays a vital part in a well-lived life. It prods us to something beyond what we could ever imagine. To a life of joy. To outcomes we couldn't choose even if we wanted to.

I want to draw from that more. Writing about these topics helps me understand the mysterious realm of the unseen better, and to live more fully.

Such a pursuit involves calling, a topic I intend to explore. I don't understand this compulsion to write that spans over years, I just know that I love it, and I fear it. I am drawn to do it, and I avoid it like the plague. I've even made career decisions that took me away from it. Those decisions worked out terribly.

I have concluded that if I don't pursue writing, it isn't because I don't know what to write about, it is because I’m scared.

Writing is bound up in what I make of my vocational calling, although I don't understand why or how. I'm unclear of the destination. No one has hired me for this task.

Restarting this blog requires personal submission in a way. In spite of no known destination, an already full life, and the absence of comfort or track record of writing and publishing, I'm giving in to this years’-long pull.

When I write I get clear. When I share that clarity with others, I share in life with them, in some kind of communion that obliterates loneliness.

I hope the posts to come will illuminate for me and for you areas that we haven't seen before, that will inspire us to be a part of something bigger.