Jordan Watch: Jordan Watch in 2008: Feeling the Value of Writing

It has been more than one month since I last posted on my English platform of Jordan Watch. I have written a few enthusiastic posts about the elections and then went into a hibernation period. Parallel to that I wrote many posts in my Arabic blog and I enjoyed the most open, personal and light ones of those.

Last year was very productive in terms of career and professional dimensions where my work as an environmentalist was a success, and I have maintained my cloumn at Addustour and done a few important consultancies. However this was at a cost of reaching a point where I am no longer "enjoying" what I am doing.

Like a horse at a Derby race I had to reach fast my deadlines with more emphasis on effeciency than creativity. I had to spend a lot of time in December assessing this situation and whether it is a safe and sustainable lifestyle.

It is surely not. My articles in Addustour were beginning to be less convincing to me and in many occasions I thought I was just aiming to fill the gap. This is not good for maintaining a reputation of some creativity. My professional work was doing well but again with less creativity than I wanted.

The main common factor between all my activities was the fact that I was not feeling the value of what I write either in Addustour, or my professional report or even this blog. The fast dynamics of life dragged me also into a viscous circle of deadlines and tasks at the professional and personal/social levels.

I decided that I should bring back the ability to be creative and feel the value of everything I do or write. To do so, I knew that I had to remove "politics" from my writing list as it was the issue most inconvenient and unconvoncing to me.

Everytime I wrote about politics I felt nervous, non-spantaneous and non-creative. I enjoyed writing in my speciality issue: environment and science. I also enjoyed writing as an informed and interested observer on social, economic and cultural issues. I maintained my almost religious passion about football which was my saviour in moments of dispair and pressure.

What I felt missing in my life was culture. I spent the year without reading a novel, without attending a concert, without seeing a decent movie and without expanding my music taste beyond what I knew since 2004. If there are resolutions to do this year it will be the following:

1- Reading 50 new novels. (one every week)

2- Listening to 50 new CDs and cassets of classical and alternative music.

3- Watching 100 new movies or interesting documentaries.

For this blog, I will stop writing in politics but I will post articles written by other writers which I think they reflect my own position and I will write only posts that I feel I need to write because they have value for me and hopefully for the readers. I think I many not write more than 100 posts this year but I promise that each will be better prepared and thought of to have a good value.