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Saturday, July 27, 2013

why blog?

Good question.

I've tried journaling on more than a few occasions through my life and it just never seemed to stick.
Don't get me wrong, I love the smell of leather-bound, gold-edged pages just as much as the next bibliophilic journaling wannabe (and I have the collection to prove it!). I love separating the pages, feeling the ink slip out of my pen and onto the paper, leafing through to the next wide-ruled set of lines. Of the 15-20 or so journals I've bought since my teen years (I'm now 23), most of them contain a few pages of the familiar "Dear Journal" rhetoric, and then somewhere around 100 blank pages following. The exceptions to the usual "blank pages following" trend were those rushed moments that I needed to write down the confirmation number of the new journal I just ordered and couldn't find notebook paper, but my previous journal was handy and, wouldn't you know it, there was plenty of blank space for writing information down!

For some reason, I never became a regimented writer; just a collector of barely-used journals. Come to think of it,

I've never really been a regimented anything.
 

It's not like I don't have thoughts. I have plenty! Some of them are funny, some off color, some deep, some shallow, some small, some big. They come in different shapes and sizes, they strike different chords with different people, and they even effect me, the thinker, in different ways. And you know what they have the tendency to do once I've thought them? Disappear. Like a drop of Red #40 in a 50 gallon drum of Hawaiian Punch, my thought is lost among the high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and other natural flavors of life. I don't suspect that all of my thoughts should be saved, but the ones that have worth - that have the flavor of wisdom, that are fizzy with timelessness, or have an aftertaste of glory - I don't want to let those ones escape. It is those drops, those thoughts, that I hope to catch in mid-fall and preserve for future generations.
 

What would the thoughts of the great thinkers of yesteryear be to us if they had never been written down? What if they had not taken the time to spill ink after plumbing the depths of a great conundrum? What if the most profound questions, answers, and statements had never been accounted for? Perhaps those same thoughts would have been formulated by someone else. Of that possibility we can only guess. But what I do know is that I'm glad to have, written in journals and books, the great thoughts of great men and great women who dedicated themselves to leaving no great thought un-recorded.


I don't think my thoughts or my life could be considered "great"; but if they reveal a truth about God, about reality, about life or living, then they are great because of the object of my thought, not by virtue of my ability to think. There have been thoughts that I've thought in times past which excited me, awed me, humbled me, and moved me, and I wish that I could now remember them. I hope to never feel that twinge of regret, that "O, how I wish I could remember" feeling, again.
 

Therefore, I now blog (who knows for how long?). Enjoy my thoughts if you take interest in them. I will warn you ahead of time: I am very regular, boringly normal, monotonously...monotonous. But I promise to be real.
 

Why blog? Because on the off-chance that I say something profound, something worthy of remembrance, then it will remain, long after I have passed, to encourage and inspire a future generation.
 



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