In Passing

I haven’t wrote in a while now. It’s not because I had writer’s block. I didn’t even try to write. Although now that I’m getting the words back into my fingers, perhaps something like writer’s block is slowing starting to push back. I wrote four to five times a week pretty consistently earlier in the year but since writing my last post, I haven’t written in a couple of months. I happily embraced the extra time, but I can’t really say that I have put it to great use. As someone who tends to be unhappy when nothing is going on, I can’t say I really enjoyed my vacation from writing.

My intent was to write more infrequently, yet spend more time marinating ideas and hopefully looking at them a little deeper than spending half of an hour throwing concepts at a blank screen until a particular word threshold was reached. While a useful exercise, the ideas themselves felt like they began to degrade in quality over time. Perhaps they didn’t and my expectation of myself grew. Perhaps it was a little bit of both. When you are a harsh critic of yourself, you tend to push yourself into the ground and lose the excitement that motivated you to start in the first place. So, I definitely believe a break was needed, but I likely overindulged in that break. Sure, I need to learn how to relax, but if the alternative is the equivalent of stimulative empty calories, then I’d rather take my stimulus in capturing ideas in the written word rather than passively watch others do my work for me.

So, I’ll need to move onto the next phase. The marinating of some delicious ideas. The number of words doesn’t matter. The frequency of publishing posts doesn’t matter. Some people spend so much time trying to capture the perfect picture or enough pictures, but the simulacrum never compares to the essence of the living thing. I hope to find pleasure in a symbol of the fleeting memory than to try and preserve that which time always erases.