Splashing around in my archives

[brainwane]

On my main blog (as here), I tag blog posts rather erratically, and keep meaning to go back and systematically taxonomize my thousands of posts. One thing that my new blogging platform includes is another way to highlight particular posts for attention: individual "collections" of posts listed on the "Collections" page, which is prominently linked on the top navbar of the site.

Just now I went through about nine years' worth of archives to add posts to a few collections:

• Sometimes-silly ideas: I often dream up business or project ideas. Often they’re silly. Often I have no intention of executing on these ideas. Feel free to implement them. Caution: several are probably pretty bad!
• Fundamental ways I think about things: These posts illustrate some of the underlying beliefs, habits, and approaches that undergird how I reason and act.
• Detailed instructions: Systematic how-to explanations on a variety of topics.

Also, there's a DW feed for my blog at sumana_feed. I recently found out it had broken last year, argh, and have now remedied that, so please do subscribe if you'd like.

I'm glad I did this tonight especially because I ran across an old post in which I share a memory that means a lot to me:

Once, Leonard and I had to have a difficult conversation. As I gulped breath and tried to get up the gumption to go into the living room and talk with him about this thing, I did a bit of math. There are maybe 350 million people in the US, which means tens of millions of couples - maybe even a hundred million couples, just in my country. Some tiny fraction of those couples had the same problem, so, maybe twenty thousand? And it might take years for the couples to talk about it, and there are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, but even so, I thought, there must be at least a few other couples having this same hard talk tonight, maybe five. I imagined them as points of light, with bright lines crisscrossing the continent to connect us.

Just the hypothetical existence of this community calmed me. We are not alone, we can't be. We talked and came out the other side together.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Oh, the unseen yet known community is indeed useful, and sad, and hopeful.

(Reminds me of metta mediation.)

metta

[brainwane]

Oh I hadn't put those ideas together! You are so right.