More on Contextual Purpose and Blogging

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As I contemplate contextual purpose, I am considering blogging as a good fit for such an evolving purpose tailored to my current life. Blogging is transitioning me to a professional writing career one blog at a time while acting as a conduit for one of my core values: writing.

Writing is both a personal and eventually a professional value because:

  • It facilitates knowledge and experience documentation (through journaling), giving me an opportunity to possess more than intelligence of one moment (The Discipline of Finishing: Conor Neill at TEDxUniversidaddeNavarra, You Tube Video, starting at 14:12 mark)
  • It promotes creativity and self-expression through language.
  • It pushes me to aspire for clarity and precision in communication.

Blogging, as a subset of writing, lays the value‑laden foundation for my contextual purpose of reaching out to and engaging with my human community. I believe it lets me create a virtuous circle in which the purpose creates the drive for writing, and each blog validates my commitment to that purpose.

One outcome of this symbiotic relationship between blogging and purpose is intentional living. A good example is how these blogs are created.

Throughout the day, I record my thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and other ideas using my Google Recorder app on my Pixel phone. I draw inspiration from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s experience sampling method. Csikszentmihalyi, when doing his flow research, paged his subjects several times a day to capture what they were doing and thinking in those moments. He reasoned that these data points provided more vivid and vital information than interviews about past experiences.

I use my phone for a similar purpose, although I take a more informal approach. When I go out on walks, for example, I take my phone with me and record what goes on in my mind.  Sometimes, I listen to snippets of audiobooks as I walk (for safety reasons, I avoid earphones/headphones) and reflect on these snippets using my phone. Consequently, I have a wealth of artifacts to start with when I sit down to create my blogs.


[The attached clip is an example of an audio recorded during one of my walks.  This is not a scripted audio.  Rather, it is an impromptu recording more like stream of consciousness thinking]






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