“Easy to say, difficult to achieve”

My last published blog post before this in 2021 is dated May 7. As much as I love writing these posts, I reached a point where I just had to let go for a spell to consider more deeply and reflect. Suffice it to say…it was a strange year.

It’s the year I became a FaceTime puppet master—certainly not something I set out to become, but I’ve witnessed an unfolding of such wild new talents and skills, born out of love and necessity. More on that to come…

It’s the year I picked up the book that I started writing in 2019 after setting it down during 2020 to focus on family in a pandemic. As Zoom school, doctor appointments, birthdays, weddings, and funerals became the new norm in 2020, I knew I needed time to just breathe into this transformed world, feel the radically altered landscape, and reflect deeply before writing again. 2021 gave me that opportunity.

My daughter and son-in-law offered me the use of their ’79 Airstream motorhome and a dear friend gave me an awesome, oak-sheltered spot to park it, plus the critical electrical and internet hookups. I spent 4 days every other week focused on researching, reflecting, and writing in this unique Writing Retreat.

I suppose the most humorous moment was stumbling upon a “completed” full outline of the book from 2019 in a Google doc. Have you experienced one of those moments when you find some creative invention of yours—a story, a poem, a painting—from another era and you wonder who created that? It was a good solid outline for an interesting book, from a much simpler time (even though we thought it was Oh So Complicated then).

Thanks to my family and friend’s support, in the shelter of this unique Writing Retreat, I was able to set the usual day-to-day work and distractions aside and make significant progress on a new outline made essential by the radical challenges we lived in 2020 and continue to live today.

I look forward to sharing with you insights and artifacts I’ve discovered during this ongoing journey of bringing forward a book that might be useful for parents, caregivers, grandparents, educators, therapists, and anyone interested in wellbeing and technology.

Like my writing retreat, I’ll share new blog posts every other week—I’m thinking on Mondays. I’ve learned to appreciate the pace of every other week. I wrote posts for this blog almost every Friday for 3 years. I loved writing it. My life today requires a different rhythm. I have a lot on my plate as we all do. I think anyone who takes the time to read these posts will also appreciate a different pace. We have so much we need to read these days.

As always, I’ll be using my superpower to curate the best of what I’m seeing and hearing—children’s books, tools, games, podcasts, organizations doing thoughtful, restorative work, courageous role models, etc. And I’ll dig into the Mindful Digital Life archives to resurface pieces that might be relevant and useful.

“To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve.”

—Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

In Memoriam—E.O. Wilson, June 10, 1929 – December 26, 2021

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