Refocus

When I started this blog I was pretty open-ended in defining what it was about.  Effectively, it was about whatever I was interested in and wanted to concentrate on to the extent of making some notes and turning them into a post.  Initially, it was easy to find topics.  For the last six weeks, until Tuesday, I was in Italy, first for the photography workshop in Umbria and then four weeks of studying Italian in Bergamo.  But that’s behind me now.  I’m back home and back to a certain kind of routine without the inherent interest of things noticed during travel.  What to write about isn't so obvious.  So I thought I needed to revisit the question of what the blog is about.  What’s important enough to me now to make me stop, figuratively scratch my chin, and write a few lines about it?

I was awake early this morning, a combination of crashing early last night from jet lag and an empty stomach, an effort to deal with extra pounds I brought home.  I was done sleeping, but I didn’t want to get up.  So I came back to the questions about the blog.  Laying there, I considered and rejected several possibile ways to refocus.  Finally it occurred to me that most of what I'd been considering -- various environmental issues in Italy, France and the U.S. -- could, in one way or another, be tied to issues of “sustainability.”  As enormously broad as it is, this seems like what I want to work on.  I only have a general sense of what the idea involves and I’d like to learn more.  Who knows, I might even write about our household efforts to live more sustainably.  It’s certainly an orientation that’s broad enough to allow reading all kinds of things.  These days almost anything can be linked to it; certainly all the usual environmental issues, urban development and land use, and, of course, politics and political figures and government.  The issues are as current, if not more so, in France and Italy as they are here.  I’ll also pay attention to what’s happening in the U.S.  I should say, though, that this isn’t going to be blog about sustainability per se; it couldn’t possibly be.  Rather, I’ll be trying to make it a blog about topics mostly in these three countries that I find interesting and that are somehow part of this enormous project.

Update: I need to mention a couple other topics that might not have a connection to sustainability but which mean a lot to me: I mean photography and soccer.