So much. So much.

It’s a New Year.  It’s an arbitrary day out of the year, but culturally we use the Gregorian calendar and select it for new beginnings. Resolutions. New determination. Where I live north of the equator, we’re 12 days past the winter solstice. Days are getting longer (finally). There’s a trickle of additional daylight each day suggesting hope.  It’s auspicious.

I’m coming off break. Almost two weeks with little work done. I should clarify and say market-driven for my employer/profession. There’s always personal, household, and commons work being done but our culture doesn’t acknowledge that work.  Only exchange for money matters. The fact that I’m talking this way is also auspicious.  There were many powerful moments in the past year that I treasure.  Two of them were listening to David Bollier speak about the commons at OpenEd17 and whatever moment last year I was inspired to describe the Open Learning Lab work I’m doing at LCC as building a “Commons of Our Own”.

There were many other epiphanies, for example, almost anytime I read something from Sean Michael Morris.   If my culturally-conditioned new year’s resolutions stick, I’ll be writing much more about these epiphanies and insights as this year unfolds.  There were also amazing experiences. OER17 in London. Domains17 in Oklahoma City. OpenEd17 in Anaheim. Two OER Summits in Michigan. All of it sparked an amazing amount of learning, insight, creativity, and excitement for the change I can help make in the coming year and years.

An auspicious beginning for 2018.

But I’m stuck. I’ll be back on campus tomorrow. There’s no required f-2-f work today for me. So while the campus comes to life today, I’m staying in my home office and slogging my way through enterprise an LMS and “syllabus management” system and reading the emails. A message from payroll playing gotcha about the break and my interns. Reminder of how the LMS and syllabus management system are paragons of the learning prevention genre of systems.

I’m reminded of the budget, organizational, and policy battles I face when I’m back. Open learning hangs by a thread. It’s a spider’s thread to be sure, but it’s a thread nonetheless. I realize that all those epiphanies, all those insights, all that empathy, and all that transformation I’ve experienced over the past few years with the help of the open learning community were mine. The others on campus haven’t had them. Most of them don’t want them. Too hard. It might mean doing and not just complaining. Everyone’s too busy doing and being, well, busy to learn or change.

The more I learn and more I change, the greater distance I feel from my colleagues. Physically I am still at the same place. But mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and soul-fully, I’ve journeyed far.  I feel increasingly like a man from Mars on the campus.  And that loneliness, my friends, is inauspicious.