This is so far out of character for my conception of myself that it gave me serious pause. In the past, generally speaking, I'd hasten to get everybody I knew to read such a compelling book. I'd bring the full force of my personality to bear evangelizing for it. It's not that I would be especially obnoxious or indiscriminate in trying to share things. It's just that this book was easily among the best I've ever read, and certainly, something of that quality would have erstwhile compelled me to spread the joy of reading it far and wide.
But we age, and our social circles contract, and the people we remain in contact with grow busier and busier, and less inclined to try things which are not in their habits, or perfectly suited to their preferences. And so the zeal that formerly motivated me to tell the world was reduced over time, in consequence anyway, to making blog posts, and then Facebook posts, and then tweets, and then, basically, to silence.
I can see the same overall trend in my life. Always a fan of words, but growing willfully quieter by the year, as experience teaches me more and more how little an impact my words are likely to have. Can you remember, two years ago, how I spent December issuing forth the best things I'd posted on-line that year? But no such thing could be concocted from last year or this one. They are too empty.
In some ways, I am my own worst advocate. I wrote a book, and put it up for crowd-nomination to the Kindle Scout platform (which I would be much obliged for you to nominate, if you haven't already). I posted about it on social media, and received but few nominations, hardly enough to have any hope of actually qualifying. Then, my wife and some friends shared it on their respective pages, and the nominations started pouring in! It was moving to be so supported, but it was also very strange, considering my wife and I share most of the same social media connections.
True, there was more to my wife's post than my own, and social media is a poor place to go looking for anything, but the experience simply underscored my own poor abilities to engage with my social network. I used to feel differently, and I don't know if my own abilities have faded, or if the entire process has gotten more difficult, or if (the scariest option) I was never any good at it, and have just gotten better at evaluating outcomes.
The lesson here is that there are other, surer ways (for me) to engage with people than this thing called 'the internet'. In the spring, I will be teaching a university course for the first time, one on Business Law. Now I have a whole host of new concerns to occupy me, but if I do it right, I will have quite the captive audience. So I need to debate with myself what things I should teach them, what I really want them to come away with, besides a sense that there are a whole lot of Business Law concepts they have yet to learn.
I want to make the course my own, in a variety of ways, but naturally I hesitate. The indelible marks of my personality will characterize it whatever I do, but how much do I really want to turn this into a soapbox? How much do I really understand, and how much value is there in what I have to say? Nowadays I spend most of my time as a sounding board, and when I'm truly heeded, it is with great, staggering reluctance. That is one way to live a life, but it's really no way to teach a class. A teacher should have authority. So once again I must redefine my relation, and build a new identity. It is a task which wears thin.
Ultimately, I will be okay. That is the way of things. But the road to being okay is not one of stark, abrupt transformation. It is a path of a thousand little steps, and many questions asked along the way. These are some of them.
