Wonky is Not Just One Thing

~ Mark

In June of 2018, a volcano destroyed my home and place of businesses and vaporise all of my possessions. To say I was left in a state of shock would be a vast understatement. Thankfully I had many friends and acquaintances reach out to me with offers of help, support, and thoughts about what I might do next. There were all sorts of ideas from the sublime to the ridiculous. As time has passed, I have explored different ideas and paths across the spectrum. There was one idea that I discarded early on as being even too odd for my taste, and i have a high tolerance threshold for odd ideas! But I’ve been slowly coming around to this idea. I might just be adopting it by stealth.
My history, and so my instinct, is to find a niche and fill it — stay tightly focused. But the idea was not that. And yet, it is feeling ever more right with who I am. Anyone who knows me knows I have a lot of disparate passions — technology, personal and organisational transformation, ecological sustainability, work/life balance, a feeling of ‘home’, a desire to be useful, sailing, travel, etc.
I have had the domain and working name Wonky for many years and it has been a vessel for whatever practise I embraced at that moment. The odd idea is to let it embrace more than one passion area. They all contribute to my whole. They give me balance. There is poetry in the interplay of these passions that is lost when I focus on just one. I am a coach, and I am a relentless DIYer — each part of me lives in the other. I find that my passions feed each other when I allow them to cohabit. I no longer want to separate them into separate little boxes. I want them all to mix. And I want that too for Wonky. This is the odd idea. So what will become of the Wonky FB page, the Youtube channel, Insta account? They will broaden out to embrace parts of me that never seemed to fit.
How will this affect you? Well, if you like to see my wonky or personal posts you will get a smattering of many different things that interest or involve me. It will no longer be niche, not nearly as focused. The unifying point will be my personal interest in the subject. So if you follow me at all for one aspect of what I do, you may be disappointed to see posts that seem too far afield for your taste. I’m sorry about that, but this feels the only way forward for me. I’m hoping that you will find your own story congealing around a broader foundation such as what I propose to do. We are of course capable to being useful in very specific fields — it is what we do most of our lives and have done for generations. But we are complex creatures and perhaps there is meaning to be made and found by displaying the networks, or systems of thought and passion that make up who we are. I’m gonna give it a bash and hope you come along for the ride.
Thanks for the odd ideas. And if you have any others, please feel free to share them!
M

Published by Mark

Like most people, I embarked on adulthood with a plan. Then life came along to remind me how silly most plans are. Life is random and both goes along with, and defies our plans. Like billions of others like me, I've learned this at the sharp end of life. But I am learning to live with it. So let's do what humans are good at and communicate with one another to make sense of this aspect of life.