Not all who wander are lost

J.R.R. Tolkien

I defended my dissertation in April 2003 (on my 33rd birthday). That is when my propensity to wander intellectually really hit its stride. The shackles of 12 years of higher education had reached culmination. I started to review for a journal in my field. Five years later that journal asked if I would serve as an associate editor for the new editor. The new editor sent me a list of possible reviewers that the previous editor had provided. I looked myself up in the list. Next to my name - under “areas of interest” - the previous editor had written: “All over the place.” My original inclination was shame and regret that I had not been able to articulate my focus. I wondered whether my career in academics was to be filled with such a lack of focus, and more so, what did that mean, and to what end?

This newsletter (well not this particular post, but the newsletter writ large) is a long, and ongoing story, I attempt to hash out answers to those questions.

Yes, my career in academics was to be filled with such a lack of focus (at least a lack of focus from the perspective of those with a myopic view of focus); but more importantly - I’ll try to unpack what that means, and in terms of to what end, I can only talk of my journey, what I’ve learned, how I’ve used what I’ve learned, and how I continue to try to use what I have learned. The end might come any day but every day I consider the end while working simultaneously for the day, and for tomorrow in hopes that it arrives.

Photo credited to my friend Gary Moore, taken of me in Concord NH on the bank of the Merrimack River

The overall message is exemplified by J.R.R. Tolkien, “Not all who wander are lost” - from Fellowship of the Ring, in reference to Aragorn. It tells us that that a person’s desire to explore can be their life purpose. The editor of the journal captured my wandering early, “All over the place”, and for that I am not only grateful, but pleased to have been given that inclination since I know no other way.