Note: To see what the 5 Minute Month is all about, click here to read the first post in the series.

As I look back over the experience I’ve had with the 5 Minute Month series thus far, I realize that I’ve been enjoying setting myself free from the constraints I had placed over the content I tended to share or write about here. It’s liberating, in many ways, to simply offer up a thought or two that is much more “of the moment” than a researched / cited work of scholarly inquiry or amateur journalism. And that’s encouraging in more ways than one, particularly as the process of conducting a job search (both academic and non-academic, at this point) and teaching full-time over the last few months has cut into the time I have to craft the sort of blog posts that I most enjoy writing and reading.

In many ways, there are good parallels between this 5 Minute Month experiment and my running habits of late; as I noted in one of the last posts, my running and workout schedule took a nosedive when I injured my leg earlier this winter, and I’ve been working my way back up to speed slowly. With a race coming up this weekend, and having lost a little over a week to a headcold, I made a commitment to run and/or hit the gym each day this week, starting with Sunday. It’s been a good week for that, and I’m optimistic now that I will be able to avoid simply embarrassing myself at the race this weekend.

That having been said, I’m discovering that it’s easier for me to make time to go running than it is to simply sit down and write a short post — and that’s something that I never would have believed to be possible when I was 20. At that point in my life, I was much more deeply engaged in writing for my own edification and enjoyment than I was interested in fitness (and it showed). It feels like I’m starting to regain just a little of that old mentality, giving myself time to write about my own interests and ideas, sometimes even before I embark on a day’s worth of writing for professional reasons, and I think that’s incredibly important. Getting back in the mode of just writing for the sake of writing is one of the main reasons I undertook the 5 Minute Month experiment, and right now, it feels as if I’m half-way there.

Word count: about 400
Time: About 7 minutes