This post is long overdue thanks to demon PROCRASTIGNAT, which Augustine, I and many others have more than often met. As she warns us, mind the gap!
long gaps of time without writing make you feel guilty and now the gap has stretched so wide that it’s almost an ocean…
So eaasy to insert a gap!
My thoughts have been swimming, my mind going through some cognitive restructuring, checking and re-checking my assumptions and plans since that spring in September 2006 when I flew back from the FLNW event in New Zealand.
An unfreezing process started, the seeds were sown, the wheel was put to motion and the ideas started germinating. Uprooting the existing mindset takes time though, and it has been difficult to document the transition process, which is most of the time blurry, unfocused and messy – some threads take time to unravel.
The picture illustrates this well. Here I am, still tangled in my habit and ways of seeing the world, trying to rise and emerge, shed off the trappings of the traditional institutional values of learning and structure of employment and as Edgar Schein points out, suffering from learning and survival anxiety.
The first steps towards change have been taken – a meager retirement pension (still better than nothing), a sabbatical that can be extended for two years and some traveling around to talk to people and view different options.
Both Road Dahl’s and Stephanie Booth’s Going Solo have inspired me. The former, through the chronicles of his war experiences with lots of humour and sensitivity to others’ feelings, and the latter, a Swiss ex-middle school teacher gone tech, through the energetic and frenzied multilingual and multimedia narrative of her first steps in the free-lancing internet industry environment.
However, the Economist article about entrepreneurs in Brazil warns that in addition to risk-taking,
what determines good entrepreneurship in Brazil is the ability to navigate around the bureaucracy.
What will I accomplish or change by leaving one system to get into another which looks exactly the same? Is there any chance of survival and progress for highly connected, networked and enterprising people to work in education and technology here?
Time and experience will tell. Scary but exciting to envisage flying on your own
