Why am I starting a blog? It seems at the outset that I must make some attempt answer this question. Having come of age as the internet grew from a curiosity reached by dial-up modem to a gargantuan network with untold masses of easily searchable content, I have had every opportunity to blog for years, but I have never before seriously considered it. Until now, when I have written outside of the context of work or school, my writing has been for an audience of one — myself. I have kept journals with varying frequency for years. This journaling has served many purposes — the cataloging of my experience, the cathartic exploration of my emotions, the gathering and organization of my thoughts about the subjects of my intellectual and artistic explorations. I have written frequently for an external audience in my capacity as a paralegal, but there the motivation, subject, and purpose are always completely external. In short, I have rarely turned my efforts to internally motivated writing for an external readership. So why now? And on what subjects? Here, as I might have done in journals in the past, I will try to unravel the feelings and motivations pushing me to create a blog.
There is, of course, an element of vanity in any blog—the very act of publishing a piece of writing in the public sphere implies a belief that one feels one has something worthy of note to contribute to a world already saturated with content. And at its worst, the blog as a medium can be part and parcel of the navel-gazing, self-obsessed internet culture of the 21st century. But I want to believe those self involved motivations are only a small part of my decision to start blogging. For one thing, I want this blog to become a tool for sharpening my editing skills. From a purely technical standpoint, my approach here will be quite different from my approach to journaling, even if there may be overlap in subject matter. For me, journaling was always an act of capturing something ephemeral in myself. I may have paused to consider my thoughts between sentences, but I never made any effort to go back and edit what I had written, apart from the occasional correction to spelling. My journal entries were like photographs of my mind, capturing a snapshot of a particular moment in my life. Part of my motivation for taking up blogging is to move into a medium where editing will take more precedence than writing itself. I want to hone my ability to express myself articulately and with circumspection.
This desire to hone my technical abilities in editing is dwarfed by another internal motivation — a growing desire to find new outlets for personal expression. I have been working in a corporate law environment for nearly four years now. That environment has afforded me opportunities for professional growth and a modicum of intellectual stimulation, but the work has never really touched my spirit deeply. In terms of personal philosophy of life, I long ago came to the conclusion that for me, the tangible evidence of a life well-lived would be in the form of artistic achievements. I am a long-time musician, an occasional woodworker and sketcher, and I have recently taken a burgeoning interest in photography. But until now there has been a gap between between my philosophical attitude towards art and the actions of my life. The role of artistic creation in my life was not commensurate with the importance I ascribed to it. I feel that my drive to create is not yet wholly satisfied, and I want to start living a life more in line with my philosophical attitude towards artistic creation. I want to use this blog as a medium for exploring my experience of being alive in the present, and I am hoping that by devoting time to writing, I will come into a fuller sense of adequacy in self expression.
Of course writing offers far more than self expression in the present, important though that expression is, and I hope to reap many of its other benefits as well. Writing can, for instance, profoundly change the way we relate to the past. Where memory falters, writing can take it by the arm and guide it back to strength. In looking back through my old journals, I have at times rediscovered aspects of myself and periods of my life that I had long forgotten. This sort of rediscovery through writing affords an opportunity for reinterpretation of the past, which can be a powerful lever for personal development. Writing turns the past into a mine where new veins of gold may be discovered in the present.
For this purpose alone, I admit, a journal would suffice. But I also admit that there is a vanity in me that wants to capture parts of myself in case others one day want to know more about the man I was and the man I hoped and hope to become. I want to create a tangible legacy of my transitory time on this earth, both for myself and for those who come after me. I want to draw on that other great strength of writing — transcendence of mortality. I want my digital footprint to be more than a small heap of data about clicks, website visits, purchases, and special offers. I want to give it some of my humanity, and I hope that through this blog I can anchor these fragments of myself against the currents of time that would draw me downstream into complete oblivion.
If there is an element of vanity in my blog, I hope that in time there will come to be an element of giving back to the world as well. I intend this blog to cover topics related to my intellectual and artistic pursuits in a broad array of disciplines, such as the visual arts, music, literature, science, philosophy, mathematics, human language, computing, film, photography, history, perhaps even world affairs and politics, though those last are prickly subjects in such polarized times. I want each post to be an essay a la Michel de Montaigne — an act of experimentation and exploration. Just as I have often profited greatly through the words of others, I hope that in some small way my musings on life may prove interesting or helpful to others as they make their way through life. I hope that by giving more of myself to the world in this blog, I may in some small way be able to influence the minds of others in the direction of personal, artistic, and intellectual development and self-actualization.
There is one other motivating factor for my writing worth noting here. I am hoping that this blog will drive me to be more accountable to myself. I have many varied interests in life, and I have a tendency to flit between them like a hummingbird tasting the nectar of first this and now that flower. That is not to say that I have no sustained interests — language study and guitar have been consistent pursuits for years, for instance — but I would like to be able to keep a closer accounting of how I am spending my time on intellectual and artistic engagements, not so much because I want to limit the scope of my explorations, but because I want to exercise more discernment in shaping and guiding them.
With that, I would like to welcome you to my blog. I hope that you may find something worthy in my reflections.