I woke up yesterday thinking about what I wanted to write. And today, same. Yesterday I stayed in bed for a while, enjoying being able to puzzle through ideas under the warm sheets, knowing it was -15F outside. Today, I didn’t lounge – even though it was even colder outside. I got out of bed early (well, before my alarm went off anyway), so I could get started. I made coffee and started outlining. Didn’t check facebook or weather or any of the stuff I normally do in the morning. I just immediately started getting ideas down on paper.
I haven’t been excited, like this, to spend time writing in… well, I don’t remember the last time I woke up thinking about what I wanted to write or got out of bed eager to do it. Writing is essential to my work as a university faculty member. I am supposed to think about stuff. And write it down. And I find myself eager to do that work.
Part of the reason I was excited to get going the past couple mornings is that I have some momentum. I followed Jerry Seinfeld’s advice and started using an old-school calendar to mark days I write. Starting last week, I put a big ‘X’ on each day that I did any writing, which gives me a visual reminder of my momentum and a tangible motivation to keep it going. I’ve also been writing whatever comes to mind. I haven’t forced anything or tried to meet any deadlines. Whatever comes out, that is what comes out. Some of the stuff I have written has been kicking around in my head for years and I am finally getting it out. Other stuff has been in process for a while and I have been revising things that were incomplete. And some of it – including the stuff that got me out of bed today – is new.
This is great!!!
Truth be told, I had been starting to worry I couldn’t write anymore. That I had not just lost momentum, I had lost the ability to do it. Or maybe I never had it. Writing has always been a slow process for me. I had begun to wonder if that was because I never was the writer I had imagined myself to be.
And I had started wondering whether I had anything worthwhile to say. The more I read the more I find other people having said stuff similar to what I thought were ideas I had come up with. I love and hate Bruner for that reason. And Toulmin. And others. I tell my students to expect that to happen – to expect that, when they get into the literature, they will find that other people have had their ideas already. And I try to tell them not to be discouraged when that happens. I try to tell them that it is a sign they are on to something worthwhile. But it is difficult to take my own advice sometimes.
New problems and new connections are surfacing for me though and I am starting to feel like I do have something to contribute. And its fun!
It reminds me a bit of the summer I worked at the Ag experiment station and my boss came back from an estate auction with an old Ferguson tractor on the flatbed truck. He unloaded it and asked me to take a look at it. I blew off the layer of dust that had gathered wherever it had been sitting, then disassembled and cleaned the old carburetor, replacing the old dried gaskets. Then I replaced the battery, plugs, and rotted old spark plug wires. Those routine tune-up steps accomplished, I put the key in just to see if the starter would even turn the engine over and was surprised when it stared right up. It sprang to life like a puppy ready to go outside and play, so I drove it around the farm for a bit – and fell in love with old tractors.
Sabbatical Developmental leave has given me a chance to blow the dust off, clear out some residue, do a little tune-up, and come back to life. It’s exciting.
But sabbatical developmental leave didn’t start that way. Two days in, I got a terse message from an administrator on campus, copied to my department chair, demanding I complete another annual training. The message ended with a threat to cut me off from campus resources if I didn’t. (This also happened to be the day before Christmas Eve too. Happy Holidays.) I logged in to the training website and grabbed a screenshot of the alleged obligation as it was listed on my “dashboard”, because I knew it explicitly said “Required: no”. That is what it said when I first logged in to do it months ago. And that is why I hadn’t done it.
var required = false
You see, I am obligated to complete at least four other annual trainings as it is. And they are terrible. There is no attempt to deliver the information in a way that is meaningful. Most of them are simply a set of PowerPoint slides with excerpts of institutional policy documents pasted into them – the same slides I see every year. One has the feel of a junior high drama project, with two lawyers posing as actors, pretending to have a conversation about fraud. The assessments are poorly designed too and focus on minutia – or merely acknowledgement that I endured the tedious production. They are terrible. And none of this is a secret to anyone – as evidenced by the fact they must be repeated annually. To require annual repetition is tacit acknowledgment that people completing the course will not actually learn anything. Learning, by definition, is a lasting change in the learner’s thinking/understanding. Learning shouldn’t have a shelf-life – certainly not a shelf life of less than 12 months. That is true in any context. But all of this is in particularly strong relief where I work – which is at an institution that awards degrees. Everything else we do in higher education is premised on an assumption that, if we do our jobs well, the result is learning that lasts a lifetime. If it were otherwise, degrees would have to be re-certified periodically. And so would research studies – at least, we would have to start doubting theories based on age. (Biological evolution is an old idea. Is that good reason to doubt it?). Thus, especially at an institution of higher education, there is no plausible justification for claiming outcomes from these tedious trainings would have such a short shelf life. The annual requirement can only mean that no one, including the people who set the requirements, expects trainees to learn (or use) any of the content.
Learning is not the point of annual trainings though. They are a transparent, legal blame-shifting maneuver. The logic is that if someone breaks a rule, the institution will be able to point to the training and say, you should have known better. It is what Parker Palmer calls “the logic of institutions”. It is about mitigating exposure to blame rather than actively trying to do good (i.e., a CYA policy). As a consequence, the time of every employee at the institution is wasted (which must cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars each year) in ineffective trainings, so the institution doesn’t have to take real steps to address discrimination, harassment, fraud, etc. I find this problematic for at least two reasons. One is that I do think discrimination and harassment are systemic problems that need to be interrupted. And I am definitely in favor of safe work practices (I am the guy who puts on safety glasses to hammer a nail into sheetrock to hang pictures in my house for heaven’s sake). These half-assed trainings are not meant to actually change the behavior of people who create an unsafe, unwelcoming, or discriminatory work environments though. They are just meant to prevent the university being held accountable when individual employees do those things. Secondly, an administrator who is willing to require me to complete a training, knowing it is a waste of my time, cares less about me and my time/energy than he does about avoiding said accountability. I am frustrated and dispirited by institutional thinking that holds me and my time in such low regard.
So I didn’t waste my time on the training when I discovered it claimed not to be required. And every part of me wanted to simply reply to the terse, threatening email with my screen grab sporting a big red circle around the bit that said it wasn’t required.
But on December 23, I also knew I was in a no-win situation. If I picked a fight about how the training system said it wasn’t required for me then I would have to spend a couple of weeks dealing with the fallout of bureaucratic bullshit – and I would ultimately lose. I don’t know whether the administrator in question deliberately contrived the timing of his injunction so that I would more easily acquiesce under the time pressure, but I didn’t have much time to reflect at that point. And only having been able to afford 5 months of sabbatical developmental leave in the first place, I would be a fool to waste so much of it in a childish fight.
It was immediately obvious that the most likely scenario was the administrator would reprimand whichever staff member had been delegated the task of inputting the requirement settings on the antiquated training system we use. I know my institution well enough to know that the staff member who had been given that job had most likely done what they had been told to do, as they had been told to do it. But staff in such roles often end up as targets of blame when administrators give them bad, or incomplete, information. I wasn’t interested in creating problems for colleagues – especially when I was pretty certain they were not at fault. And, obviously, it would be easy to simply update the setting in the training system to say it was required – though, it would probably take at least a week, because the people who can actually do it would be out for the holidays. Then I would get another email with an ersatz apology for the “confusion” with the training system, accompanied by a copied and pasted missive about how the training was a federal requirement – he was just following orders after all. But, while all of that was happening, nothing would be done to stop the ticking time-clock that was set to cut me off from campus resources. The email hadn’t specified which resources were at risk, but I was pretty confident they included my library account and other stuff I needed to do the work I was supposed to be doing on sabbatical developmental leave. So I knuckled-under and just completed the fucking training without complaint. I couldn’t afford the fight, the frustration, or the loss of resources – all of which would be impediments to the work I wanted to do.
To be fair, it is true that the administrator who interrupted my sabbatical developmental leave was acting on a federal mandate to institute the training and the university could lose funding if it didn’t get done. So it was an external interest that was so keen to waste my time on this occasion. And it is possible someone at my institution advocated for more thoughtful action rather than simply just acquiescing to the external demand. Maybe they did push back and just lost. I don’t know. Even so, the administrator could have used a little more tact – or, at the very least, made sure I had received a consistent message about whether training was required before taking such a heavy-handed, authoritarian approach.
I was furious with the message, the timing, and myself for capitulating. I had worked so hard to clear space before sabbatical developmental leave started – even planning time to actually relax and do nothing the week of Christmas, so I would be ready to get going the following week. The interruption, and my anger over it, threatened to derail me before I even got started. Fortunately, it does not seem to have been more than a bump in the road (a bump in the entrance ramp, perhaps?).
The training debacle notwithstanding, the hopeful part of me was anticipating that I would get some good writing done once I got into a rhythm on sabbatical developmental leave. I had been studying for a few years, preparing myself.
Before I started talking to friends who took sabbaticals at other institutions I didn’t really know what it was or how it worked. When I heard about the fascinating sabbatical projects people like Adam Johnston have completed, I started getting excited. Then I started asking about it at NDSU and the excitement was quenched. I was told public employees in North Dakota were not allowed to take sabbaticals. I don’t actually know whether that is true, but it seems right. I have known too many academics who have approached a sabbatical like it was a 6-12 month vacation. North Dakota farmers and ranchers have no tolerance for that – and rightfully so, frankly. They are footing the bill. To treat sabbatical as a vacation is a perversion. I am still not sure whether I was misinformed or if the policies have just changed lately to be less of a dis-incentive. One way or another, it is presently a plausible thing to do and still have enough income to maintain a mortgage, meals, and other basic needs. However, the fact that I was approved for something called “developmental leave” leads me to believe the ban on sabbaticals in NoDak may be a thing.
In any case, I didn’t really start to seriously consider sabbatical as something I could do until I heard Dave Johnson talk about it as an essential part of the rhythm of missional life. And that took me to Wayne Muller’s work, which gave me a conceptual framework to think about the role sabbatical plays in doing good work. And now I see it as a thing I can’t not do.
In his book, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives, Wayne Muller talks about it (sabbatical comes from the same root as sabbath) as an idea that appears across the world’s great wisdom traditions. It is perhaps best known by the name it is given in Jewish traditions, Sabbath, but it exists in other theistic, non-theistic, and atheistic traditions as well. Indeed, it is part of natural cycles throughout our universe: rhythms of work and rest. Seasons, the water cycle, life cycles of stars and galaxies, sleep cycles, all sorts of things go through cycles in which a period of rest is essential to prepare for periods of productivity. To think we can be productive at work without ever stopping to rest, Muller say, is like thinking we can breath by only inhaling and never stopping to exhale.
Muller gives an example of nuns who had started studying rotational grazing practices and decided to try it with the cows in the pastures around their convent. The idea is, instead of giving livestock unregulated access to a whole pasture, the animals are sequestered on a specific part of the pasture until they graze that section evenly and fully. Then the animals are moved to a different part of the pasture and sequestered there to graze the new space while the prior one regrows. The reason for this is that animals will eat the most tender and tasty plants that are available. So if they have access to the whole pasture, they will wander around looking for stuff they like and overgraze that while the stuff they don’t like gets overgrown (and, consequently, even less palatable). Eventually the stuff they like gets completely mowed down and can’t regrow, because the animals obliterate any new growth before it gets going. Then they only have the stuff they don’t like to eat, so are less happy with their food. Perhaps more importantly though, different types of plants provide different nutrients, so the animals become malnourished when the aren’t eating the full selection of what their pasture can grow. Sequestering them on a particular part of the pasture forces them to gaze a greater variety of what grows there – and leaves other parts of the pasture free to grow all of the plants. (It also distributes poop more evenly, so the growing forage is more evenly fertilized.) The nuns who tried this soon found plants growing in their pasture they had never seen before. The seeds and plants had been there all along – they just hadn’t been able to get a foothold to grow with animals eating them before they could get started. Simply giving parts of the pasture a break from the animals occasionally made it a more nourishing and productive place for the animals to be when they came back. A bit of rest leads to an overall increase in productivity.
Importantly, Muller describes a rhythm of rest and renewal. He does not talk about rest as a time to do nothing. He says “take your hand from the plow”. He does not say (and this is the important bit) sit on your ass. The pasture is not idle when the animals are away. It is regrowing. Maintaining a tractor is work: oil changes, tune-ups, adjustments, touch-ups, etc. Similarly, when we sleep our bodies are not idle. They are busy doing things like pumping cerebral spinal fluid around in a sort of rinse cycle for our brains. Periods of rest are preparation for work. Intentionality in rest is essential to productivity in work.
Sabbatical is not vacation. It is a break from the plow, but there are different things to be done. And they need to be done intentionally.
So I am on sabbatical developmental leave. And things are coming back to life. This essay has taken a few days to develop so far, and I continue to wake up ready to write. And the writing sessions are getting longer. Yesterday I ran the battery in my laptop down, twice, to the point it asked to be charged. The first time, I put the machine on its dock to charge while I took a break for lunch. The second time, I stopped for dinner. I had more to say, but I decided to call it a day. Which meant I had energy left at the end of the work day to do… anything I wanted. I had energy left for me! That is also new regrowth.
All this makes me happy, but at the same time I am wary. The fact I am talking about regrowth means, like the overgrazed pasture and the neglected tractor, I was out of rhythm. It reinforces what I have been saying for a long time: I have been exhausted. And the burnout had severely diminished my capacity to be productive. I would not be in need of RE-growth if growth had been happening all along. And it would be a problem to rely on sabbaticals as a way to recharge after years of an exhausting pace.
Pastures are resilient, because the soil contains an extensive soil seed bank: millions of seeds from previous generations of plants, waiting for the conditions to be right for their chance to germinate, grow, and yield fruit. Similarly, antique tractors are resilient. There is a LOT of iron there and almost all of the parts are made to be replaceable when they wear out. As long as the main castings remain intact, everything else can be rebuilt and replaced ad infinitum. As long as the casting remain intact. And as long as there are seeds in the soil seed bank, pasture will regrow – even if wildfires burn all the foliage to the ground. Each new generation that survives to produce seeds contributes them back to the bank. So new generations can keep springing up. As long as there are seeds in the bank. If a tractor or a pasture is maintained, there needn’t be any end to their productive lives. If they are maintained.
Muller says that, if we don’t make time for rest, then sickness and disease become our sabbath. If a tractor sits unused and neglected, it rusts. And the rust eventually breaches the casting. If a tractor is used too long without proper maintenance, parts begin to wear and fail – sometimes catastrophically, as when a broken piston rod punches a hole in the engine casting. A breach in a casting is the end of a tractor. If plants cannot grow to maturity, they cannot produce seeds or replenish the soil seed bank. The number of seeds in the bank is finite, so if they continue to germinate without the resulting plants being able to produce seeds to replenish the bank (i.e., if they get eaten before they go to seed), eventually there will be no more viable seeds left. Overgrazing without replenishing leads to the end of that plant life in a pasture. Occasional missed maintenance or occasional seasons without new seed production are normal and do not adversely affect tractors or pastures. It is the chronic failure at renewal that kills them.
My anger about another fucking training may seem out of proportion. I don’t think it is. It is not irrational. It is not out of nowhere. There are reasons for my anger. Well-informed reasons.
The reason I lost momentum for writing in the first place was excessive job demands. I had a promising line of scholarly work and a number of noteworthy publication in the first few years of my faculty position. Then a series of retirements and other losses of faculty left our doctoral program with a glut of students suddenly lacking advisors. I am a teacher. So my priority was to support those students. Over the 13 years I have been in my job, I have had 16 doctoral advisees graduate. Over the past 5 years, most of the doctoral programs on campus did not have as many graduates as I did individually. I have also tried to be a good citizen and taken on leadership roles in faculty governance. That came at the expense of my own scholarly work though and my publications slowed to a trickle. And once a line of scholarly work loses momentum, it is difficult to regain.
There have been other times along the way that I have gotten excited about regaining momentum on writing. A few years ago, over the summer, I decided to start a writing habit – sort of like a workout regimen. My idea was that writing is like exercise. It is hard (even painful) to get started – and it takes a ton of effort not to give up when you get winded. But stamina builds quickly and it starts to feel good – not just the sense of accomplishment, but also the improvements to overall wellbeing. So I developed a routine of sitting down with pen and paper, in the same place at the same time each morning, to generate text. I kept it up for several weeks, filling more than half a legal pad. But then the school year started – or rather, meetings started. And the routine ended. Few entries made it into the pad after that. Some of the entries on that pad developed into postings in my blog. Others are in the queue and may still be finished and posted as blog entries – or something else. And I have worked on them here-and-there over the past couple years. But I never regained that initial momentum after it got derailed by the start of a school year (until now).
I have often described my job as feeling like I am constantly being tugged-at – like a parent with a gaggle of children pulling at their sleeves. ‘I need you to sign this form.’ ‘Do this training or else.’ ‘We need a member for this committee.’ ‘When are you available for a meeting?’ ‘We need to update department policy, because university policy changed.’ ‘THE STRATEGIC PLLAAAAAN!!!’ ‘Save your work quick, because your computer is going to restart in 3, 2, 1…’ ‘Oopsie, we can’t find the files that were lost when your computer was updated.’ ‘Sorry for the late notice, but a candidate for an important job is giving a public presentation today at 3 minutes ago.’ ‘Add these 20, 2-hour meetings to your calendar.’ ‘Complete this survey.’ ‘Couldn’t find a meeting time in the last poll so please fill-out another one.’ ‘Submit that report.’ ‘Can you read a thing for me?’ And on and on. It is death by a thousand tiny papercuts – or a thousand tugs in a thousand different directions.
It is not that the tugs are trivial. Most of them are about things I consider to be worthwhile. But their number increases daily. This was an impetus for Berg and Seeber’s book, The Slow Professor. They review research that shows my perception of the increasing number of demands on my time is real. It is not just my imagination. The life of an academic has become increasingly fragmented over the past few decades. And that is bad for academic work. Our job is to think about stuff. Deeply. And write it down. It is impossible to think deeply (let alone write thoughtfully) when one is yanked up out of the depths of thought every few minutes with another time-sensitive demand. Higher Ed has become one big distraction machine.
A little more than a decade ago, I was excited when a new president instituted “listening groups” to find out what needed to be addressed on campus. At the time, I was surprised to see the effort mocked by national columnist Gregg Easterbrook, who pointed out that:
North Dakota State University sponsors “listening groups” that warn users their contributions will NOT (caps original) ever be used “for making any decisions”.
At the time it seemed cynical and jaded to me. In retrospect, it was prophetic. As far as I can tell, neither that report nor the subsequent road mapping exercises, strategic visioning, or other slew of public data gathering for purported planning purposes have been used for decision making. But we all stopped what we were doing to give input – repeatedly – because we got the tug.
Some critical theorists point the finger at autocratic administrators for bureaucratizing higher ed, instituting a monsoon of paperwork to keep faculty distracted as they consolidate power. Others argue it is a consequence of administrative bloat, with too many people in the middle now trying to justify bullshit jobs by manufacturing paperwork and red tape processes. Administrators, it seems, are to blame for our jobs being exhausting.
I don’t buy it.
I have known a lot of administrators over the decades I have been in higher education and I struggle to think of one who is a power-hungry asshole. I know they exist. But they are very much the exception. I can think of lots of administrators who genuinely care about their institutions and the people they lead. Of course, I can also think of a bunch who are incompetent or cowards. And I have seen a LOT of flailing attempts to institute “best practices” that give the appearance of forward thinking – but are effectively just new polish on the same old turd. Like any job, administrators are a mixed bag. But seriously, who gets into university administration for the power or the glory? And processes that are overseen by middle-level administrators are usually identified or developed before the position is created. Usually those policies are a response to finding that something important wasn’t getting done (the number of faculty members who knowingly suck at advising and the number of university departments that offer degree programs with no plan to check whether those programs are any good is astonishing).
I do think institutions of higher ed are overly bureaucratized – to the point I am not sure they can function. And I think most administrators (unknowingly, I believe) reproduce the inherently dehumanizing, Taylorist ideology that underlies so much of the discourse of contemporary U.S. education. But I am less inclined to blame leaders and more inclined to wonder where are the stewards?
Peter Block argues that the way we typically conceptualize leadership is shot-through with patriarchy. And he is more critical of the led than the leaders. We don’t want to take responsibility to be stewards of our institutions, so we seek leaders to parentalistically institute accountability systems instead. Leaders we can blame when something goes wrong.
Concomitant with the dramatic increase in numbers of administrative or executive positions in higher ed over the past few decades has been an increasing trend of faculty behaving as independent contractors. Berg and Seeber point to more faculty members working away from their office (and, consequently fewer interactions with colleagues) and increases in ghost advising (especially for women, faculty of color, and faculty from other minoritized groups) as symptoms. And I hear destructive advice being given to beginning faculty members like, ‘don’t spend any more time than you have to on teaching.’ This is stupid advice. It is premised on the idea that only publications count and untenured faculty should focus their energy only on the beans that get counted. But the faculty are the people who decide which beans to count! If we can’t teach well and produce enough of the other beans that will be counted for promotion or tenure, then we should change the policy. Instead, faculty members give each other advice to do less teaching – in an institution of higher education – to free up time for individualistic pursuit of publication. And to what end? I often hear that someone got a paper published. I rarely hear any discussion about whether or why said paper is important. And when some of those papers are dedicated to arguing about whether the percentage of published research articles that are never cited is closer to 30% or 90% – or whether it can really be true that half of all published research is never even read by anyone other that the author and editorial office – it hardly seems rational to point to mere numbers of publications to justify short-changing students (or colleagues). How is that anything other than negligence?
Faculty culture has become one of entitlement. Thus, while “faculty” is a collective noun, people with the title behave increasingly individualistically. I think that is the root of the problem. And the more entitled faculty have become, the more of their jobs they expect someone else to do.
To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that leaders are innocent in all this. But to simply complain that administrators are creating bureaucratic red tape to make our lives more difficult is disingenuous. Much of it is a response to faculty not doing their jobs (or behaving badly). I think that, to respond by creating a new oversight mechanism (administrative position, committee, reporting process, training, etc.) to fix each new problem is as misguided as adding an obscure syllabus clause because that one student got away with doing that one bad thing that one time. It only exacerbates the problem of individualistic faculty behavior – and creates new loopholes for bad behavior (and sends the message that bad behavior is common). And that makes administrators and executives complicit. But, the problem is rooted in the failure of faculty members to do the whole of their jobs.
Voltaire said, “A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady.” Likewise, a proliferation of oversight mechanisms is a sign of deficient responsibility – and a failing institution.
So I am conflicted. I am enjoying one of the core parts of my work as a university faculty member, namely writing about stuff I have been thinking about. But the reason I can do that is that I hit the pause button on the rest of the job. My sabbatical regrowth is possible because I don’t have a thousand things tugging me in different directions. But part of the reason I am usually pulled in so many directions, I think, is that too many faculty members haven’t been doing their part. We are all collectively responsible for cultivating learning, but many people simply do not have their hand on the plow. And now there are a million little systems in place to compensate for, and absolve, all those missing hands. And I wonder, to what extent am I complicit?
I also wonder about what will happen without the protective bubble of sabbatical developmental leave. In just 5 months, can I pick up enough momentum to continue carrying me forward when I return to the plow? Or does the bureaucratization of higher ed have too much inertia. Am I wiser now than I was when I over-committed myself in years past? Will I be better able to maintain healthy rhythms of rest and productivity? Or is there just too much work to be done to draw reasonable boundaries and still maintain the integrity of my whole job. Will I ever be able to count on my colleagues to carry their share of the load?
My work requires focus, concentration, and most of all time. My job is relentlessly fragmenting – and increasingly so. After all, I just acquiesced to yet another administrator who is willing to knowingly waste my time. And I now have another worthless, annual training obligation to keep me from my work.
Will my job always be the thing that will stop me from doing my work?
Lest this all seem like it is just about me, I will say that my biggest fear – my only real fear – in posting this essay publicly is that students might see it and decide they shouldn’t “bother” me. That sort of thing already happens. My students see that I am busy – and don’t want to be among the thousand things tugging at me. So they don’t ask when they need something from me. The problem is, they are the ones who should be getting my time and energy. I try to interrupt that thinking. I tell them they are my priority. I want them to feel like they can be first in line to tug on my sleeve when they need something – because they should be first in line. They are the core of my work – one of the few things that is actually essential. I can’t be a teacher without students. And I love being a teacher. Students should be the priority of every member of the faculty, staff, and administration at an institution of higher ed. Yet, students routinely tell me they see how busy faculty are and that they don’t want to bother us. “Bother.” That is the word they use to describe what they feel like they are doing. When they ask their teachers/mentors for something they need. As students. They feel like a bother. How can the job of an educator keep me – keep us – so busy that students feel like we can’t have time for them?
I don’t know. And I am going to stop thinking about it for now. This essay is one of several I have been working on over the past week and its 5,700-ish words feels like a pretty good accomplishment. I am sure I will circle back to the questions eventually, but new growth is popping up everywhere and I am excited to get on to nurture it. I’ve got a string of X’s to maintain!
