Would you look at that? It's a new year already.

The original title for this post was going to be, "The system worked." Then I was going to go with, "I'm still not sure what hit me." Suffice to say: December was one wild and crazy ride. I am not complaining about where it left me when I got off, though. Everything that happened made sense and was handled quickly, competently and compassionately. Some people who will remain nameless have officially impressed me. (I would say, "You know who you are," but the likelihood that any of them are reading this post? Small.)

Some other people impressed me too, and I get to name them, because I will be working with them! Starting this week, I will be joining Free Geek as their Human Resources Administrator. I will be a member of the management collective. I have mixed feelings about leaving libraries, at least for the time being, but not about my new position. The HR aspects of being a library administrator were among my favorites--and, heck, for the first seven and a half years of my career, I functioned as the HR department for my library. Systems and forms and documentation and wrasslin' with external bureaucratic forces that mere mortals should never have disturbed? OMG So. Very. Sweet. And Free Geek's mission is right up my alley.

My family had some concern about the, shall we say, poor image of HR folks in our society. I completely understand. Livelihood, health, dignity, long-term security--is there anything HR can't threaten for an organization's employees? I tried to explain that HR work appeals to me for precisely that reason. Wherever there is a function that can provoke hostility and anxiety, I want to be there to mitigate them at the least and to help re-engineer things to eliminate them at best. (At the top of my library wish list during this past job search? Circulation and scholarly communication.) If "thankless" is an adjective commonly used to describe a particular job, chances are I'd jump at the opportunity to do it.

I will probably still write about library stuff here on this blog. In some ways, it will be easier now that I'm not responsible for any actual libraries. I don't have as much of a personal stake in how my comments are perceived by other librarians. Which feels kind of freeing, and also kind of daunting: appropriate feelings for the start of a new year, it seems to me.

An unintended sidenote about contemplative education.

So, over a week ago, I said, "Next week there will be links." And have said links appeared on this esteemed blog? Indeed, they have not.

There are a variety of reasons for this lack, both domestic and professional. The temptation is to give those reasons (or at least allude to their seriousness), apologize, and promise to do better in the future. But why is this the temptation? Why are there so many blogs with posts about how the author feels bad that they haven't posted so long, and really, truly they will soon have something brilliant and/or funny and/or meaningful up for whatever audience they may have?

Imagine a classroom. A teacher walks in, says a few words, and invites a response from the students. Mostly there's silence. Occasionally someone will start to say something and kind of ramble off. Let's say this goes on for, oh, 20 minutes. Has any learning happened?

By traditional criteria: no. By contemplative criteria: maybe. Students may have learned that a particular topic is hard to talk about, or that they wish some of their classmates would have developed their ideas more because there was some interesting stuff there, or that when left to sit with a topic for while all kinds of unexpected connections with other classes pop up, or that silent teachers really cheese them off. Who knows? The teacher, too, may have learned something--about the students, individually and collectively, and about their own engagement with and investment in the teaching/learning process.

The point being, when learning is set in the context of personal formation, everything is a potential learning experience. Even actual not-learning is potentially educational. The two obvious complications in contemplative education, then, are time (contact hours and credit totals) and expected measurable results.

The analogy to this blog is obviously not direct. I'm not teaching here, and whatever readers I do have, aren't students. Any lessons from this missed self-imposed deadline are my own to learn. But looking at my own reaction to it, and realizing how much contemplative practice has moved me over the years towards being relaxed and accepting of unmet expectations instead of anxious, suggested that it might be worth a post.

Whys and wherefores.

So the immediate motivation for starting this blog was to have a spiffy Online Librarian Identity for commenting at the AskColorado Staff News blog. (AskColorado, if you didn't know, is a free and excellent 24/7 online chat reference service that's a collaboration between libraries of all types in Colorado, plus at least one from a neighboring state). The less immediate but more lasting motivation is to publicly explore the relationship between contemplative education, library research, and the services, structures and policies that enable that research. After 10 years of professional librarianship in public, special, and academic libraries, I find that I have, y'know, opinions. Which may or may not be of interest or value to anybody else, but who knows? Besides, it is an inherent good to try to be more orderly in one's thoughts, and to have some accountability for them, however limited or theoretical. And so, one might start a blog.

Would you believe...

...contemplativelibrary.blogspot.com was already taken? I'm not 100% sure on the script/language there, either. Oh well.