I have no idea how many times I’ve started to write a journal in the past, only to have the effort devolve into an unattractive exercise in whining about what my life was not, or had not become – or at least what I thought I wished it was, or had in it, at that point in time. Alternatively, too many of those forays into self-examination skidded and stuttered their way to becoming lists – like to-do lists, or shopping lists, or lists of dream trips, or lists of activities/sports/adventures that I hoped to motivate myself to pursue. Some even morphed into the most depressingly detailed analyses of whatever diet or exercise program I was involved with that time. But no matter by what route, all of them ended up aborted and abandoned, until some later time, when the itch to use the journal form to help me to examine my thoughts in a disciplined, organized way – to figure out “what it’s all about”
(ack, ack, gagging going on here) - drove me back to the journaling project, and a brand new journal book. Oh, and I have lots of nice, new journal books, plus an embarrassingly large number that are only partially filled – Moleskin books of various sizes and page layout, leather-bound journals that look great and just feel worthy, even 3-ring binders I acquired after I read that Mario Cuomo had amassed an enormously detailed collection of journals he had written on punched sheets and kept in 3-ring binders, and, lastly, a totally uninspired collection of mismatched journals picked up at one bookstore or another, mostly on impulse, and often only to assuage the nagging feeling that I SHOULD keep a journal, but with no actual plan as to how I wanted to use them.
And now, here we are together at the first post of my new blog, which looks suspiciously like a cyber version of a journal, and which I urge you to watch carefully for any sign of emerging lists, of almost any sort – a signal that perhaps the end is near, and you might do well to be eyeing the exits for the quickest route out. But don’t worry. While I am indeed once again involved in another version of my perpetual struggle to lose weight and get in shape
(some shape other than round), we’re not going to discuss that here – at least not now.
However, if you’re expecting me now to explain to you what my vision of how I would like this blog to develop might be, what its “mission” is, and how we will travel there, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not what’s coming next. Instead, I’m hoping and trusting that the impulse to which I have surrendered by starting this blog is really just the seed of an idea that will germinate and push up a trembling, fragile shoot whose genus and species will only become apparent as it grows and matures into whatever form and function its karma and its DNA will lead it to take. Part memoir, I suppose, part dreaming “on paper”, a bit of trying to understand and make sense of experience by virtue of the discipline and orderly thinking one hopes accompanies writing things down – all of those things may happen here at various times and in varying degrees, one hopes with at least sporadic success. Come on along if you like - comment, criticize, encourage, condemn, supplement, redirect, or just listen. Let ‘s see where we end up.
And now…
