writing Archives – Page 9 of 31

Tilt

On May 7, 2021

On life’s strange encounters with chance…and golf.

Indulge me. Follow along for just a minute. Think about all of the things that have happened in your life that have just fallen into place–life’s quiet serendipity–the universe’s tilts that steer you one way or another. It can be the sort of thing that brings a chuckle in a quiet moment. Or a weepy joy. Or a dazed feeling.

I think about the luck I had when I needed to change jobs and leave teaching. That one’s simple–I wanted a different job and they needed to fill a position and it worked out so well it turned into a new career. We can go deeper–a long-ago college friend whose young boy’s brain grew a tumor, the sort that is decidedly stubborn to remove without complications. I think of all the cellular decisions and revisions that multiplied into mass.

Hard to stare something like that down–a boy in a children’s hospital in dire straits–and then take these cosmic coincidences kindly. Easy to call the benevolent strokes of luck divine intervention. Not the darker ones.

Keep following.

Tossing Out Mr. Hogan

By James D. Hogan

On April 28, 2021

In writing

Yours truly with a group of former students in 2007.

Cleaning is cathartic, but how do you throw out a profession?

For eight years, I’ve kept a half dozen copy paper boxes shut in a closet in our basement. These boxes were full of file folders that were, in turn, filled end to end with paper, thousands and thousands of pages that were the sum total of my brief career as a high school English teacher.

Pop psychologists sometimes talk about the baggage we carry around with us as we go from place to place and point to point in our lives. It makes for a nice metaphor: this notion that we are often weighed down by reminders of our previous experiences, and that cumulatively, these experiences can inhibit our way to make any kind of progress.

The good news is that the yards of copy paper in my basement never impeded my ability to leave teaching and find other work–that turned out just fine. And yet, I’ve lived with them in a sort of hidden proximity ever since I left my classroom in 2007. I cannot remember why I felt compelled to save them.

It’s Up to Us

By James D. Hogan

On January 7, 2021

In writing

America’s people lend their hands every day to the solvency of this nation. Today, we must resolve to put those hands to work.

Our democracy is not written in stone. Rather, it’s written on paper–paper that can be written over, crumpled up, or burned. Our nation is a crucible in motion–growing, changing, and moving, and not without pain. That is my less than poetic attempt at saying that the future of our nation is up to us–we, the People–and only us.

After yesterday’s assault on the United States Capitol Building, an act of insurrection that attempted to occupy, abuse, and disrupt many of the symbols of our democracy and, chiefly, the peaceful transition of power, we the People should be more concerned than ever about what we are to do with this remarkable nation.

Category: writing Page 9 of 31