Apologies for the unannounced break the last two weeks. Life happened!
Insights
During my break, about three weeks back, I had a rather startling realisation. My intellectual life of late - productive though it has been - has also been kind of barren and monotonous. In the last two months, I had virtually read nothing else apart from papers required for my research. Everything that I was reading was for ‘work’, tied as it was to some ‘output’. In other words, I found that I was not reading anything simply out of pleasure or curiosity or personal interest.
This was a serious concern for me, for I thought I was genuinely missing out on the best parts of an intellectual life: being able to journey through the world of ideas, exploring new ways of seeing the world and experimenting with novel systems of thought. There is so much more to PhD life than the research project and one needs to be mindful of that.
As a corrective to this tendency, I decided that I should completely turn off all work after dinner and use the remainder of the evening to explore things that interest me or that I am simply curious about - with no end or purpose or output in mind.
At least that’s what I am trying to do. I don’t succeed every day, but there is definitely some progress and that counts.
Ideas
Academic conferences are strange affairs. They are often badly organised and managed. Sometimes the schedule is so packed that you barely get 10-15 mins to present your work. And you don’t even get asked good questions, so the quality of discussion and the feedback you can take from it suffer as a result.
Notwithstanding all this, you should still apply for and present at as many conferences as you can manage. For the simple reason that they are about you and not anything else.
It is the process of preparing for a conference presentation that I see as most valuable, not the outcome. Given that you will be addressing a slightly more general audience, not all of whom may work in your sub-sub-sub-field, you will be forced to distil and simplify your ideas. You have to make your thoughts come alive, come up with creative examples and find commonsensical ways of explaining difficult concepts. You also have to distance yourself from your own work and constantly think about how you can make it intelligible to strangers who have no acquaintance with your work.
All this, I believe, makes you a better thinker and researcher in the long run. And as with any skill, the more you do these things, the better you get at them.
Practice alone makes perfect.
Inspiration
This week was all over the place for me, mostly because I had too much time that I did not know what to do with.
I did do the things that I was ‘supposed’ to do, but the things that I ‘wanted’ to do got lost in the void of time.
As I step into the next week, I am asking myself: how can I stick to the things that I say that I want to do?
Excellent