Back in Business

It's pretty shocking, and a bit depressing, to discover that it's been nearly a year since my last post; while there are undoubtedly many reasons for this, it's time to get back to blogging. Just as there were many reasons for my withdrawing, there are equally many reasons for coming back online. Maybe the closest thing to a percipitating agent, however, was a recent article in the Harvard University alumni magazine [Elizabeth Gudrais, "The Unlikely Writer," Harvard Magazine, September-October 2009] about the surgeon/writer [of New Yorker magazine fame] Dr. Atul Gawande. In this article, Dr. Gawande is quoted as saying that "he thinks in stories and feels a compulsion to write. In fact, he recommends that everyone do a bit of writing .... 'by putting your writing out to an audience, even a small one, you connect yourself to something larger than yourself... An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community, and also of concern to contribute something meaningful to it.'" I love what he's saying and think that blogging, if only to one or two kindred spirits, is a way of sharing and testing ideas, and maybe, at some point, even contributing to a larger community that are interested in the same ideas. It also, of course, forces me to think about what I'm thinking about, and to crystalize my thoughts so that I can revisit them and develop them in the future.