I’m going to spend more time on this blog in 2015.

I’m going to do this with great skepticism and trepidation. I’m 45 and tenured — the quintessential “mid-career professional.” I’m probably not alone among those in my profession wondering to themselves “how do I continue to add value to my profession, my students, my institution, my friends and family, my community and the world.”

After the requisite week of “new years resolution,” I’ve answered this question for myself by committing to redoubling my efforts to build a public voice through this blog and other media. There are numerous other things I could do than try to hastily put out premature ideas to meet some abstract quota. My approach to blogging has been to be pithy and quick. To save the “slow thinking” for book chapters and journal articles. Doing this, I’ve met with marginal response from the “world out there.” Often times I’ve thought that my blogging did more harm than good, believing that it does nothing more than present me and my “ideas in progress” to the world as a “thin intellectual.”

Over time, my post frequency dwindled as my professional and personal duties increased. But if I’m honest, I stopped posting regularly because I felt as if I had less and less to say to fewer and fewer who would listen. This might be the existential crisis of most academics who fear their less that their labor will fall on hostile ears and more that they will fall on no ears at all.

I know it is just another in a teeming ecosystem of voices and it may land imperceptibly on indifferent ears, but I’m willing to try it again with more fervor. I come back to Camus’ call to make meaning of humanity’s absurdity. If we are all like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill only to have it fall back down over an over again, then I’ll put my tendonits-plagued shoulder to the task in the hope that it makes a marginal difference.