Every Post is Practice

I'm not a Buddhist in any religious sense. I haven't taken the Precepts. I haven't shaved my head. I don't read scriptures, or sutras, in any language, living or dead.   

However, I have taken to heart a central idea of Buddhism, the idea of practice. Mindfulness meditation is a practice, one breath after another. If a thought arises, note it, let it go, and return to the breath, over and over. Thoughts are like bubbles in a beer. Some can cling to the side of the glass for a long time. Eventually, however, they all float to the top, maybe hang around in the foam for a while, and then they pop. How can one bubble be any better than another? Bigger, faster, louder, sure. But better?   

This is the attitude I want to have about my Steemit posts. It might seem that this goes against the idea of ranking posts, which is sort of the whole idea. However, if I regard each individual post as practice, then the goal is to become a better writer, as I define it, one post at a time. Not to preserve the bubbles, but to drink the beer. Feedback is helpful, but the feedback is not the point. The point is to notice the process as it happens, and to enjoy the process. If I post enough good things, sooner or later, one of them will pop.   

This is not faith in the power of positive thinking. I can offer a concrete personal example. The very first educational animation I ever wrote for Ted-ED, almost two years ago, has been viewed over a million times. The very first one. 

So far, the only one. Not because of intimidation, or pressure, or fear of failure. More because I thought that, as an self-employed entrepreneurial type person, giving away my work was not the most profitable use of my time. And yet, except for ideas, time was the single thing I had the most of. With no outlet other than business pitches and public talks, a lot of things went unsaid. What was I saving those ideas for, exactly?   

Besides, it just feels great to be writing regularly again. My last blog, VSI: Variation Selection Inheritance, accompanied a podcast that I produced for the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, funded by the National Science Foundation. That project was the most consistently fun thing I've ever worked on. Yet.