Yesterday I re-watched an interview I did with Dean Shareski a couple years ago (and wrote about it). In that interview I lamented that social media and blogging are not what they used to be. I felt a bit of sadness thinking about how rich the conversations were that we had ‘back in the day’… When I’d post something on my Pair-a-Dimes blog and full conversations would happen in the comments and on Twitter, and how this would sometimes even inspire another blogger to write their own post… and this is one of those posts.

From Chris Kennedy’s blog post, Building Our Noticing Muscles:

“After my recent post about What We Notice, my friend Dean Shareski left a comment that challenged me to write some more on the topic. He wondered how much of our ability to notice the little things is inherent and how much is learned. He suggested that noticing, like delight, requires us to pause long enough to appreciate what might otherwise pass us by. And he wondered if we could actually build our noticing muscles.”

Later in the post, Chris wrote a section titled, “Thinking in Blog Posts”. It starts:

“Writing this blog has had a similar effect, although in a different way.

After more than 15 years of writing Culture of Yes, I often find myself thinking in blog posts. I will see something happening in a school, hear an interesting comment in a conversation or read something that makes me curious. I wonder about it. I want to know more. Sometimes I start connecting it to other things I have seen or experienced.

This post is a good example. It began with a comment I could easily have read, appreciated and moved past. Instead, it stuck with me. Many of these ideas go nowhere. They never become posts. And that is fine. The value is often in the thinking that happens along the way.”

Thanks to Chris, I now realize that it wasn’t so much the conversations themselves I enjoyed about the old days of blogging, it was the thinking that happened along the way. And that hasn’t disappeared for me, I just find it in different places. It took a post on ‘noticing’ to help me notice what I couldn’t see. I was stuck on the ideas of lost discussion on blogs, lost engagement on social media, and didn’t notice that I still find these things. I still have my thinking changed by friends, and bloggers like Chris and Dean. I still have my thinking changed on social media, but more likely on TikTok rather than on Twitter.

For years I’ve felt like we passed the golden years of blogging and something was missing. Now I can see that while things changed, I’m still finding ways to push my thinking, and inspire my writing. I feel like I’m seeing both the past and present with new eyes, noticing the differences without placing judgement that ‘things were better back in the day’.

Chris ends his post (well worth reading) thinking about schools and how we need to slow things down sometimes so that students can notice things too. I feel this. I read the post this morning, started ‘thinking in blog posts’ and wondering how to put these ideas together, but I needed time to let it brew in my brain, for me to notice the connections I wanted to share. And so this post became about the thinking along the way, and not just about the nostalgia of the old days of blogging.

I owe Chris and Dean gratitude for helping me to reframe my thinking, and notice that while the sharing, engagement and connections have changed, there are still many wonderful ways that my thinking is challenged. I need not feel remorse for the loss of the way things were… there are a lot a great ways to excite and inspire my thinking and blogging today.