Resolution: no resolutions
I don’t do New Year resolutions. I gave them up a couple of years ago, because they’re just setting up yourself to fail at an arbitrary point in the year. I’m a parent of small children, who works part time to help raise then and support them. I don’t have time for doomed self-flagellating attempts to reshape my life.
Morning Pages? Great idea – conceived of by someone who clearly isn’t wrangling pre-schoolers.
That said, there is something about this time of the year in many countries that makes it special. Having so many people taking holiday at one moment in time creates a form of pause in the working year, in which many people disconnect together. And that naturally causes reflection and reassessment.
For me, that often comes down to what’s missing from my life. And I know what that is, as it’s been for a few years now: creation.
The accidental journalist
I’m something of an accidental journalist. It wasn’t something I planned on being as I grew up, but instead blundered into it via a love of photography and a lack of confidence in a student a magazine office nearly 27(!) years ago. I love creating, and I’m pretty neutral about the medium in which I do it – words, photos, videos. It’s all good. But I need an audience. I’m not an abstract creator, labouring for the love of the art alone.
That was what appealed to me so much about blogging in the early days. I could write or shoot whatever I want, whenever I wanted. And if I wanted to do a week of nothing but photos, I could. That was such a liberating change from the stifling routine of my day job on a weekly B2B magazine where formulaic working patterns were essential to actually getting the damn issue out every week. So liberating, in fact, that it quickly became an obsession and, a few years later, a job.
That’s transition’s always hard, though, as the need to be professional starts to eat away at the silly experimental fun of blogging, or other forms of digital content creation. One Man & His Blog, my 13 year old “main” blog, is very much about the intersection of publishing and technology these days, which constrains me. And the problems with other blogs I’ve tried to launch to scratch the free-wheeling itch is that it’s another site to maintain and build.
The inescapable existence of Medium
Medium? Medium is just, well, there. And I’m in Medium a few times a day reading anyway, so maybe I should spend some time creating here, too, rather than just cross-posting my longer pieces from One Man & His Blog. This morning Loic Le Meur assured us all that the mobile interface was well worth playing with for quick thoughts – so maybe that’s what I need to do: follow my own mantra of connecting the “that’s interesting” thought with the action of blogging about it as soon as possible. I’m granting myself permission to just play here – to blog it old school, like it’s 2003 all over again.
But it’s not a resolution. Never a resolution.
