A grand accomplishment

I made a breakthrough today on something that has been bugging me for quite some time.

What is amazing about this breakthrough is that I made it by NOT doing something.

I have a project to build a series of resources for a particular aspect of my teaching and I felt that I needed to build a philosophical rationale to explain and support the work I was doing. I spent several days building a framework and today I got to writing. As the day went on, the writing became a rant and the rant became richer and more refined, and I even rebuilt my blogging theme to allow this grand gesture to have a great spot on the screen.

I copied and pasted the title and then I copied over the post and I read it again and tweaked it and reread it and… then I stopped.

I stopped as I realized just how my great and wonderful (and powerful) words could so easily be misunderstood and could cause others to be hurt or possibly cause some to shy away from the very thing I was attempting to address. I have no idea what stopped me today or why I could see what I had not seen for the previous days but I think I have just shown myself what I attempt to show others. I so desperately wanted to speak my words out loud and have others join in and push ideas around that I failed to see that the act of getting to this point was all I needed for me to be able to move forward with my project. I do not need to publicly jab at others or to whine in a disparaging way about seemingly important issues, rather I need to quietly go about the process of building my set of resources to support others and trust that those who need and use them will benefit.