We have an experienced restaurateur in town. He has started three successful eateries. I read that his new 4th one is planned to be able to specialize in one sort of food, first Italian, but to be able to switch to another specialization when desired. An article mentioned barbecue, Asian fusion and Brazilian as future possible emphases. He is the man behind a local place that offers tapas, small dishes expressly designed to allow a diner to order more than one sort of entree.
This approach appeals to me. If a person uses the internet and social media or email much, if a person gets books suggestions from Amazon and its affiliates such as Goodreads, if a person looks at Google News and the many sources that service taps into, it soon becomes clear that the world is too big to know and his head to too small to contain much of it. The natural conclusion is that I can't do everything, I can't know everything. I just have to reject some good possibilities. I can't even explore everything.
But! But! But I like to remain open to disconnecting, switching, beginning, continuing and ending. As a 12 year old and in the decade that followed, I knew I enjoyed people. I didn't have much money and my high school teachers and my smart mother suggested teaching. Through some twists and turns, I got a PhD in educational research. It turns out to be a rather vague field and can pretty well cover just about anything.
When I retired, I continued specializing in something that came up in the last decade of my college teaching: distance education, often called online teaching. I also thought that basic meditation is simple and easy but writing about meditation while more and more others were doing the same thing got to be something of a deadend. Blogging, following the example of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and Sarah Bakewell (1963-), emerged as a natural extension of thinking, writing and lecturing. Using Google's tools Blogger and Sites allowed me to reach out worldwide and think and write as broadly, and also as narrowly, as I want.
