It feels important to try and acknowledge in the moment when something is good. Too often we can get caught up in the business of finding reasons not to be cheerful, as though in grumbling about minor issues we can ward off the really bad ones. I’m in another transition phase at the moment and in that shift it’s given me opportunity to pause and feel greatful.

It’s partly a transition time because I’ve been spending lots of time on a couple of non-PhD projects I’ve been working on, and I’m back to just focusing on my PhD. They have been related to my PhD so it’s not a total shift but still, they weren’t entirely filed under PhD work. I put in a big old shift over the weekend on one of them so it felt like I was coming back to work this week for a bit of a rest.

Even if I hadn’t been working on some other projects it would be a transitional phase at the moment in any case because ethics approval has been granted. My project is officially ethical!

Given how much I have enjoyed the ethics framing I’m not surprised to find myself feeling quite touched by that approval.

More tangibly, it means that I can now start to officially talk to people and do the more direct data collection activities. I’d already made a start on some aspects of the research alongside my literature review, collecting together and starting to review cultural materials and existing government and industry reports. I’ve also done some study dates, such as the ones to Sambourne House and Tate Britain and a couple of archive visits. So it’s not like that part of it hasn’t been happening at all, again not a total transition.

It feels very different getting to speak to people or send out surveys directly, rather than relying upon existing materials though. A classic part of the research and PhD process. It feels like it has been a long time coming but then this is a marathon not a sprint so perhaps that’s not so surprising after all.

And it’s exciting to imagine what I might find. Fun to not be able to entirely predict how something is going to unfold and where it might lead. Privileged to be able to do it at all, I mean really, what an absolute privilege to have made this space for myself, to be able to back myself to explore and try something different.

It’s good sometimes to be able to sit with that and cherish it. Not just to rush through the moments. To try and notice as it something shifts, or when something is good and feels full of possibility or even when the possibility is getting translated into something more tangible. Allowing those moments to get consciously stashed away. Not to artificially extend it but to pay some attention, give a sense of gratitude and acknowledgement and then go back to the thing itself. Which seems a fitting note to end on, as I then turn to putting together my survey to pilot…