In my work to recover from burn-out and reorient myself on things that provide energy rather than drain me, I have identified three things to help me align my activities better with the way my mind functions.
Those are:

• Substance and exploration come first (this post)
• Peers for quality of work and being challenged
• Ideal end states as source of creativity

This post looks at the the first of those three.

While I at times vehemently deny having any curiosity, I do admit that I tend to soak up lots of information quickly if something triggers my interest, and then turn that into an overview of where a topic is at, where it’s headed and what opportunities exist to go further. Because I enjoy the exploration, following trails of links, sensing meaning in the paths I wander. It is fun and gives me energy, feeds my sense of wonder. And making meaning is where my sense of beauty resides. Meaning is deeply emotional to me.

However running a company, juggling family logistics, fulfilling board positions, and the myriad of other aspects of everyday life, easily get in the way of that: there are always plenty of little and big things to solve before I’d normally allow myself to get around to just read, take information in, digest and curate it. Denying myself opportunity to do that is common. I had a whole range of years I avoided non-fiction reading because there wasn’t anything I could do with the expected ideas, vision, associations it would trigger. In the past year I’ve come to see keeping myself away from exploration as a form of violence I direct towards myself. My mental health needs such exploration of substance. So it needs to have a more prominent status, and since last year summer I’ve tried to treat it as such.

While the past months have been awfully stressful, I did stick to maintaining a place for exploration whenever possible to give myself a breather. Even if it was just one paragraph in a paper or book, or just one annotation of an article, just a single item in my feedreader or just 15 mins of following links from one webpage to another. And whenever I can, I make it come first.

It’s a form of mental health maintenance, and it feels like getting more oxygen after being starved of it.

An oddity I noticed in my perception of ‘fun’ topics to explore or write thinking notes about, is that the topics I actually spend time on in my work don’t really figure in it. As if topics suited to exploration always fall outside of the scope of ‘real’ work. This is a deeply entrenched notion I realise and it feeds into being able to berate myself that exploration is distraction. Things that are fun to explore don’t easily count, that is a very old echo from primary school.
Another, more recent, aspect is that I tend to focus on client work from an output perspective, rather than as a process. So a project which has writing a guide about European digital and data regulation as a deliverable, I approach as a task to produce text based on what I already know, rather than as an exploratory process to understand the things I then write about in the guide.
For every project I take on, I’ve recently added a section to my project template where I ask myself what types of exploration will be needed and possible in the context of the project.

If I can think of my work more in terms of exploration it let’s me refind my fascination for the topics at hand and find energy in the exploratory aspects.
I look forward to seeing how that plays out over time.

I’ve felt the positive effect whenever I’m able to build exploring into my day, giving me a sense of wonder.
Intellectual substance and exploration need to come first.