Why keep musing?

When I returned from my latest break from musing, one of my most frequent readers wrote something interesting.

You’ve already proven you have the discipline (and content) to muse daily. I hope you’ll continue, but only when you are inspired to do so and have the time.

It’s an interesting thought. Nonetheless, I’ll continue to do my best to muse daily. It’s not that I have anything to prove, either to myself or to others. And, while I appreciate that I have an audience, I don’t muse for my audience [1]. I muse for myself. I muse because I seem to be happier if I muse daily, or so Michelle tells me. Why? It’s likely a combination of things. I feel a sense of accomplishment with each musing. And each using gives me the opportunity for sustained reflection, even if it is only a brief opportunity [2].

When I muse regularly, I also find that I reflect more frequently on the various things I do or encounter.

Hey, I could muse about that. Now, would what I write …?

Even when I don’t muse, I think about things regularly. But I think about them more regularly when I muse.

I’ve also made a much-too-long list of nearly 300 possible topics to muse about. I won’t get to them all [3,6], but I’d like to get to some of them.

Perhaps most importantly, Michelle tells me that she misses my musings when I don’t muse [7]. It appears that my musings give her additional insight into what I think about.

In any case, I plan to continue to muse daily [8]. Stay tuned for tomorrow [9].

[1] Okay, I do muse for some of my audience.

[2] Like today.

[3] I’ve forgotten what I was thinking when I wrote notes to my self on some of them. For example, I have one that says mistrust (what didn’t I trust?), one that says faculty nightmares (what are they? I’m sure I had one in mind), one that says backticks [4], and one that says Grading student projects. See name’s post on Dec. 19. I can’t remember if that’s Dec. 19, 2016 or perhaps even Dec. 19, 2015. Can I even find that comment? [5]

[4] Okay, I probably remember the backticks one. It’s likely supposed to be a short musing on what you call that symbol.

[5] Okay, I went back and looked. I had scrolled back to August, 2017, when I said to myself There must be a better way. And I realized that there is. Next to the timeline is something that says Current, and I chose 2016, which got me back to the end of 2016. I’ve now saved the post, so I hope to be able to find it more quickly next time. I’ve also moved that topic up in my planned musings list, so perhaps you’ll see it in the next few weeks.

[6] I also find that I keep generating new topics, which makes it less likely that I’ll come back to the old topics.

[7] Yup, she’s the most important audience, other than me.

[8] Or is that I continue to plan to muse daily?

[9] and the next day, and the next, and ….

Version 1.0 of 2018-01-05.