Sunday, January 8, 2012

here goes-


I meant to launch a sabbatical blog weeks ago, but as I started clicking, the first requirement was a title.  I was dumbfounded.  Titles usually come at the end of a process not the beginning.  How could I name something I didn’t understand yet? I imagine using it beyond this sabbatical, and I struggled like my students typically do looking for something brief and apt.  After a few weeks of pondering (one luxury of sabbatical) Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From offered ‘the adjacent possible’ which he, crediting scientist Stuart Hoffman, describes as:

A kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself (31).

Having always appreciated the possibilities of margins, edges, and boundaries, I start this space in the spirit of sabbatical reflection and reinvention.  While a blog suggests monologue, I’d love some dialogue. Please.  I’ll record sabbatical experiences to share w/in and beyond the SPA community.  I hope they might suggest topics for discussion here and elsewhere.  Thanks for visiting.




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