This summer my blog will turn 4 years old. I have been writing with some degree of regularity on this thing for 4 years. To me, that’s kind of a long time. Still, I have had a mere 20,000 some odd visits. Some sites get that in less than a minute.
The natural question is, why bother?
The answer: I am a writer. I love writing. I love the permanence of it, I love how I can choose to remember things through writing. I love that I can make mundane things funny or otherwise… I can sculpt an event by selecting what I write about. Writing reflects what I truly value. I love stories. I am a hoarder of stories.
(sidenote, I heard a special about people who hoard this week. What a terrible problem to have! All that junk! But then I thought about what I hoard. Truly, I hate forgetting a good story. I want to keep them all and tell them when I am old and I want them to be good enough to listen to. I love my sister in law’s stories, she tells them the best, and they are so fun to listen to. So, I would like to learn that too. I hoard stories.)
I specifically blog because if I wrote my stuff just for me to read, it would be a mess. When I write for whoever to read, I clean up my act a little. I use my Strunk and White brain and I make my writing better. I use conventions correctly (more or less), which I would never bother to do if I didn’t let it loose into the wild.
I am a big lover of the simple things in life. The chimney swifts that are living in my chimney, tweeting up a storm. A delightful meal. The dumb hat I bought that made me insanely happy. I like to remember them, they are like little free time capsules.
Sometimes when I read a book, I like to put down my thoughts about it. There are some books that merit it. What I wouldn’t give for a book club that went through some of the books coming out from Brian McLaren and his ilk, as well as some of the older foundational authors like Bonhoefer. So I write my thoughts, more often so at Elisha’s Bones. They are like mini book reports. I get all into things, Malcolm X, the Amish, obscure places of interest, small islands, all this time is spent just finding out more. And I would forget it if I didn’t put it down somewhere.
Finally, I realize that I have just a precious few years to have S and A be these young little beautiful bringers of joy in my life. I need a place to put a context around this time.
So now when I wonder why I bother, I will not have to be perplexed and try to figure it out. Phew! I can check that off the list of things to do.
I love reading your posts! Please bother!