Bowing Out

Linda George’s recent article about leaving Medium to go back to work gave me the final push to announce my own exit.

This is not a screed against Medium and how it has changed. I am not active enough as a writer to follow that debate; my meteorite flashed across the sky and burnt out on entering the atmosphere long before those changes started impacting many (most? all?) writers.

My exit is steered by one factor only: my health. I am finally admitting to myself that I no longer have the strength, capacity, endurance, or whatever you want to call it to pretend I can turn out writing on any regular basis. Or even on an irregular basis.

For the record, I have a blog and I will continue to post there. It is called “Small Moments of Great Reward” and can be found here.

Don’t turn to my blog expecting stunning revelations, though. Look at the title: Small Moments of Great Reward. Not “Great Big Honking Moments” or even “Average Sized But Still Plenty Big Enough Moments.”

Small moments.

Sometimes I blog about ham sales. Sometimes I blog about our community. Sometimes I blog about old memories. I do write about my cancer, just so you know.

On my blog, I try to write what I live. My life is full of small moments and that is what I try to capture in my posts. The fact that my heart lifts up when I behold the bees hovering in the basil is one example. That small focus does not mean that I have parked my intellect at the door. Or that my life is trivial. But my blog is not a forum in which I muse upon world developments or make pithy intellectual inquiries. Even when I do write about the topics of the day — hunger, health care, legal access — it is usually about how those topics play out on a local and personal level. I do not write about my political views generally. Heck, I rarely even write about the books I read, some two to three hundred a year (and rest assured that my reading list ranges far and wide, from the serious to the goofy, from the thoughtful to the banal).

As a history major many decades ago, I quickly decided that the appeal of history was not in analyzing the Big Events but in studying the small, personal moments framed against those Big Events. (Incidentally, that is a lesson that filmmaker Ken Burns has learned to use for his and our benefit. What do you remember most from his Civil War series? Sullivan Ballou’s love letter to his wife Sarah written before he is killed in battle, I bet.)

It is the small moments that tell the story. I’ll be telling my stories on my blog.

Thanks, Medium, for the opportunity. I’ll continue to subscribe. And thank you, my followers. You made it fun.