I have been debating for a quite a while whether I should or not have a blog - I seem to be the only one left who does not, and that seems to pose the question: why not?
The thing is, I always thought the question should be: why indeed?
Why, at 44, this need for sharing one's thoughts beyond the limited realm of those who do choose to be our friends in the old, tactile, non-virtual universe of 'people you know'?
The answer needs to be that one has something to say that does not rightly flow into the course of everyday discourse: that the medium, the proximity-detachment paradox of the digital forum, creates the perfect balance for journaling in a literary form. By 'literary' I do not mean to imply any ambition, but simply to distinguish this type of journaling from the purely practical, private kind - all public blogs are, intrinsically, literary as they are meant to be read, shared, commented upon.
Most interestingly, in reviewing the arguments in favor and against this attempt, I came up with the age-old, tried-and-true excuse that all gainfully employed persons bring up in similar endeavors: time. Dearth, scarcity, paucity, lack of it. As in: 'gee I'd love to [exercise, talk to my mother, think, eat well ...], but really, I have no time'.
An interesting concept, that. Because I have found as I age that time becomes a more nuanced concept.
But first, a concession to general belief: time does move faster as we age. Mondays roll into Fridays. The months, the seasons blur quickly by our window. I think time was at its slowest when I sat in Chemistry class in High School (except for when I sat in a few Project Delvery Methodolgies classes in my adult life, perhaps), and it has been accelerating ever since - part of it is simply the variety of demands placed on our time. We live in an ADD world, one where we seamlessly move from the sublime to the mundane in splitseconds, then back again. We are endlessly, constantly distracted by life, like capricious three-year-olds: there is always something, somebody dangling a shiny new object before our eyes. Like any toddler, it is all too easy to be captivated and fall prey to the pull and push, untill we discover that precisely for that reason, time becomes one of the domains in which we become main charcters of our life, where we assert our power, what power we have, in defining how our time is to be utilized and allotted.
We speak, as we become more powerful over our environment, of making time to do something. we say that something isn't worth our while. I don't have the time to do that becomes a statement of control over our surroundings: we exert our power. We choose.
To be sure, the discovery that choice is an expression of power is not novel (the happiest reader will not expect novelty from my pages) - but it is often neglected and underestimated in its revolutionary might. For, while it is true that we cannot control the flow of time, we can, and should, do our best to control what activities we allow to take place in our days.
The idea is of course relative - I cannot choose to unilaterally ditch my consulting practice's Friday morning office meeting, but I can choose to use what time a I have on my way to that meeting, in my drive to work, to listen to, say, an audiobook of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (and good luck to me for that) rather than being subkected to yet another onslaught of 'knowledge' from the 'news'.
It is therefore with that in mind that I start this journal: in the idea that this prove to be a talisman, a token and a reminder to make time, and that this ability will translate in a choice to have time for the further things that really matter.
