“Find your obsession.”
Tough words, from Merlin Mann. Tough for me anyway.
I have never been one to obsess about any one thing for very long. This world is far too interesting and life is far too short to devote myself to one tiny sliver of a sliver of it. I learn about one thing, and after it increases my knowledge of the world, I usually move on to another subject.
Many other people do the same thing, and, when I started this blog, I thought this was its topic: learning about learning. But that really doesn’t interest me. I don’t really care how I learn, except for how I might do it better or faster. Instead, I launched it as a story about learning, how learning about the world can change someone. That, I realized, was the arc of my blog.
Though I had an arc, I still didn’t have the topic, the obsession. What about those subjects I consistently spend time with, those things that are a regular part of my life? Reading and writing have been constants; I’ve been doing both as long as I can remember. I started birding 10 years ago and I still make it out into the bush several times a year. In the past 18 months, critical thinking (the subject of my other site) has become a more prominent part of my life. But I would call none of these obsessions. They are tools to help me understand the other subjects.
What, then, did all of the items on my list have in common? Why would I have selected those things, why were they important? When I made the list, and when I have subsequently amended it, I thought the items on it would enable me to understand what it was to be human at the beginning of the 21st century. But, I knew there was more to it, an undercurrent beneath all of the items, something I couldn’t quite see.
In order to find it, I had to find the obsession. To do that, I asked, “What is my weakness? What do I find it difficult to stop doing?”
Until a few years ago, I finished every book I read, and never walked out of a movie or changed the channel before the end of the TV show. Though I have started edging away from this compulsion, I can count on one hand the total number of books I’ve left unfinished and movies I’ve walked out of.
This was my weakness: I have to finish a story.
I looked back over the list, and I saw it. Every item was about story. Either a story of my own life, or a tool to help me see a bigger story.
Shit.
I was left with a personal blog about story and narrative. Like thousands of other blogs.
I looked again, and realized there was something more, though. All of the items were pieces of a big picture. They are an attempt to uncover the story of being human, a mini-story trying to find the truth of the mega-story.
I’m left with being one infinitesimal story about trying to understand The Story.
The Story is my obsession.