on the vulnerability of transience

I've been trying to make sense of my life on the move: in the last five months I've been in 11 cities across three continents.

I am a qualitative researcher but sometimes the numbers are able to crystallise meaning for me more sharply than anything else. They don't capture the amazing experiences I've had – taking a motorbike tour in Rwanda, watching the Boston Celtics play at TD Gardens, riding in a driverless Waymo in Phoenix, visiting Pandora at the Animal Kingdom Park in Orlando, MCing a broadcasted lecture from the Sydney International Towers, running a PhD retreat on the South Coast, live scribing about Amazon's AI policy in Adelaide, swimming in the rainforest in Cairns... just to name some standouts. But they do help me understand why I've felt so transient.

My work feels like it reflects this transience too. As an interdisciplinary researcher, I often feel the blessing and the curse of being able to choose where you stand - to put your disciplinary feet across divides and bridge between academic worlds. But it sometimes feels like having one foot in water and one foot in sand, and the currents from their mixing cause the foundation beneath me to be in a constant state of change. This is the work - this is how land and sea must come together, after all - but this transience in my foundation brings an uncertainty to the way I feel about my work.

In a conversation today we were talking about our reluctance to state an opinion too loudly. Because what if that opinion changes with time? "It's like a vulnerability of transience," Maddy said. To me this is a feeling of, what if I've missed something? What if that something changes everything?

There are similar vulnerabilites about being on the move as much as I have been (and will continue to be for the next few months). I'm squeezing in doctors appointments between bus trips, I'm lodging travel approval forms and getting vaccines in stolen moments, I'm checking visa requirements and conference registration dates on airport WiFi, I'm paying too much for last minute accommodation and one-way flights.

The learnings from my experiences feel like a phone full of photos that haven't yet been backed up - at risk of being lost if a drop causes irreparable cracks, without time to reflect and capture them.

But vulnerability can open up pathways to new growth. I have to be vulnerable in my work: it is the sign that I am doing something that pushes the boundaries of what we know. I want to be vulnerable in my opinions: I firmly believe we should be evolving ourselves, and a record of that is not a bad thing. And I am vulnerable in my physical transience, but it's teaching me how much I can do and what I value in the quality of the stillness.

Change is the only constant, so goes the cliché. So maybe the vulnerability really is in the belief that we have the ability to stay still in the first place. Even when navigating a shifting foundation, we can still find moments to let our feet sink into the sand and focus on the horizon.

Recent book reviews

I got a reading bug back a few months ago, so here are a few short reviews from recent reads. I didn't review them all, but I did read four of Abby Jiminez romance novels recently before a disappointing backlog read ended my stream. My favourite one (review not included below) was Yours Truly.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Always thoughtful, interesting, well crafted and surprising. My second collection of Ted Chiang short stories and such a delightful lot of concepts.

Part of Your World by Abby Jiminez • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I really enjoyed this and got totally swept up in this little world. Alexis was sliiightly irritating in the stops she kept putting on her life, but on the whole this was super sweet and was a great comeback to the genre for me.

The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jiminez • ⭐️⭐️

I so wanted to love my fourth Abby Jimenez novel in recent weeks but this one definitely felt like a first try book, the elements that were so great in the other three I’ve read were there but they just weren’t singing. The instalove in this felt too much like love bombing a woman in a vulnerable place and the communication was Not Good. I was so frustrated with Jason and I just didn’t really like him. So ends the Jimenez streak, on to the next!