Blog networks can make for great distributed conversations. They’re like time-lapse videos of the distributed conversations taking place, much more slowly, between books in a library.
Sometimes you may even find yourself talking to yourselves, as the distributed conversation enters a wormhole and emerges into liminal spaces where some part of you still speaks on the threshold, even now, even though you long ago crossed that threshold into sorrow and willed forgetfulness. Isolation.
This morning I got an alert via email:
I wrote and published “Conjectures, Dilemmas, Hospitality, Humility” on February 14, 2014, on a Valentines Day seven years and several selves ago. I was VCU’s Vice Provost for Learning Innovation and Student Success then, as well as Dean of VCU’s University College, a bona fide degree-granted academic unit (we conferred the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies degree–about which more later). I had just learned that the provost who’d hired me, Dr. Bev Warren, was going to Kent State University to become their president. That knowledge was the first of several revelations that would culminate in my “stepping down” from my position, as the saying goes, two years and two months later.
Clocks are always ticking somewhere, even if you can’t hear them.
Rewind.
Later on February 14, 2014, my friend and former colleague Andy Rush linked to my post on his blog (the wittily named And He Blogs). It’s a fascinating post that I missed at the time.
Timeline confusing? To recap: today (February 24, 2021) I received the “pingback” about the link Andy had made seven years ago to my 2014 post. Today I read Andy’s post from seven years ago, for the first time. And today I re-read my own post, the one Andy linked to, for the second time.
It’s always strange to re-read my own writing, especially on a blog I’ve kept for nearly seventeen years, one that came into being to record my explorations of a new medium and a new role–at the time, July 2004, I was Assistant Vice-President for Teaching and Learning Technologies at the newly-named University of Mary Washington, formerly Mary Washington College.
It’s fine to say that titles don’t matter. In many ways, that’s true. But it’s what the titles point to that matters. The responsibilities. The budget (if you’re lucky). The team you can assemble, encourage, wrangle (sometimes), get of out the way of (if they’re the right team). The team you can lead. The work you can help shepherd, nourish, bring into being.
And it’s the self that responds to the role, that may indeed fully emerge only in response to the role, that echoes down the years to me now. That’s the was-me that still is-me, sure, but only in this Lenten season am I once more determined to bring that self home and respect its claims on me. Today, a message from an earlier self inspires this post to my current and future selves.
So today I left a comment on my own old post. It seemed both insufferably self-regarding and weirdly fitting.
We often talk about what we would say to our younger selves, given the perspective of the years, the learnings, the wounds, and perhaps the wisdom we have gained. Today, through the vagaries of a slow-moving pingback that reached me seven self-light-years later, I say to the Gardo of February 14, 2014: come home. Teach me again.