Surely Joy

It’s been six months since I last posted here. I’ve known for nearly that long that I’d be putting this blog to bed. It’s time to write a few words about why.

“Putting this to bed” is a term I probably learned in my first weeks of journalism school when I worked on the copy desk at The Post, Ohio University’s student newspaper. Every night Sunday through Thursday, we’d write the last headlines, give everything one more look after the layout guys completed their work, pile into a car, and take the pages — safe in a big flat box — to the printing plant. After that, we’d often pile into a booth at a late-night diner. We’d do it again the next day, yet in the news cycles of the 1980s, each day had an ending: a chance to say, OK, that’s done.

Endings are a lot blurrier these days. It’s been months since I’ve felt compelled to write here. But how do I know when I am done? How does anyone know when anything is finished?

The easiest answer is that I am practicing something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life, and especially my professional life: letting go. For a very long time, work was a big source of meaning for me. Now it’s not. For decades, I have processed things by “writing out loud” about them. Now I’m more likely to do so while walking alone or talking with friends, and often while traveling — my greatest source of meaning and revelation.

As I wrote last summer when I turned 60, I likely have a third of my life ahead of me. I want to spend a steadily decreasing amount of it looking at a screen of any kind. I also know that the media landscape I grew up in no longer exists and I have little taste for the frenetic new one; I have no desire to build a platform, launch a podcast, or even spend much time on social media.

With my good health and modest means, it will be wise and necessary for me to keep working most of this decade. But I have already arrived at a place where being content is more precious to me than producing content. My part-time job in guest services is the work I love the most, yet I’ll have no trouble completely giving up a paycheck of any kind when I know the time is right. Meanwhile, I will keep doing good work, but steadily less of it, as I continue on the glide path toward that time.

And so it is — and it has been — time to put this blog to bed. In this complicated world, may we all embrace and enjoy closure when we find it, without regrets and in the spirit of curiosity. That goes for love, for work, and ultimately for life itself.