Wei wu wei is a Taoist phrase meaning “do by not doing”. I learned about it the summer I read the Tao Te Ching. I was reassembling myself after quitting a job teaching high school geometry. My students had been lovable kids and my coworkers had been supportive peers but I had slowly been turning the job into a gauntlet of challenges I could no longer complete. I took each imperfect lesson as a failure and traced failure each to some action or preparation I had failed to do. After two years, I resolved the emotional toll of always being unable to do enough by stopping doing any of it.

Years later, I am midway through a PhD in Sociology but I am starting to feel the same way about my writing as I did about my teaching and I don’t want to repeat that arc. One thing I am trying to help with the burden of never doing enough writing is by writing this blog to you, my mystery reader.

It will be an outlet for me to babble whenever I cannot wrangle my thoughts into academic form. I have been writing at least 30 minutes a day to keep the fingers limber and I think if I have this blog as a place to write for fun, it will keep those 30 minutes from devolving into a chore and compounding my writing ennui. Maybe this can be a place where I can write by not writing.

We will see if any structure emerges from my stream of blog-consciousness. I am interested in sociology, small communities, board games, power, Buddhism, and change so maybe some of those will turn into common topics?