It’s a great big world and almost anything you can name has more than one way of doing it. Diversity is the hallmark of the universe we live in. There isn’t just one plant on earth there are millions of different plants. There aren’t just one kind of stone there are myriad different geological composites. There isn’t one climate on the planet, indeed climate changes every few miles of distance and meters of height.

We accept all this diversity without a thought, but when it comes to how other people do things suddenly people want us to believe that there’s a right way and a wrong way and wrong way and YOU my friend are doing it WRONG!

So, where am I going with all this?

It’s about writing. I love this quote from Joanne Harris about motivation in writing:

In the same way there is diversity in the world we who write — whether for $$$ or for fun — do it for as many different reasons as there are people. For myself I have spoken on other occasions about the fact that for most of my life I have written as a way of processing the world around me. Almost like dreaming. In a dream we are told that our brain is sorting and filing the memories stored in our cranium and that what we perceive of a dream is but the smallest and perhaps most insignificant part of the dream process as our body functions.

What I have written about hasn’t exactly been a flowchart of my life, Rather it’s been signposts to points of interest. Not so much a way of remembering what has been important, more a way of signposting points of departure, conjunction, cessation and initiation.

But sometimes, as has been the case in recent months the flow of life has been muddied. It’s been as if my life was a gently flowing river that found itself poured into a large lake. As the water flowed it has taken a while for my brain to find the “way out” — and indeed to discover whether there WAS a way out. After all, some rivers do end. in some other body of water whether it be lake, reservoir, another river or ocean.

2022 and 2023 have been years punctuated by medical issues for the both of us. I’ll share a little more as time goes on but we’re both still mostly functional and the uncertainties about our bodies have settled down enough that we are able to think about other stuff once more.

Additionally, the thing about aging is that you come to realize that as your abilities change perhaps your situation needs to change too. We’ve been pondering the idea of what do we do if this place we call home no longer suits us? Where do we move, when, how, all those attendant questions that trail along with us as we move our bodies from one place to another. We, Peggy and I, have decided that a physical move is the right thing to do — and that is another process that we are in the middle of — right now at this moment. Boxes are starting to surround us on the floor even though it will be nearly a month before anyone comes along to drag them off to a new residence.

Back in the 2000’s when I was making money using my camera I fussed and fretted a lot about just WHAT my photographic STYLE looked like. At the time I wasn’t thinking about my writing style — I was young enough and my brain was fast enough that I just sat down and wrote. I wasn’t having to write for $$$$ so I didn’t have time pressures or editorial concerns I had the luxury — still do — of writing if and when I wanted.

I remember back then reading other blogs what were obsessed with how they said things. At the time I listened to those conversations with a sort of curiosity as it was foreign to me. I just sat down and processed. Which was my salvation — I needed to write to process what was going on; writing wasn’t an adjunct, it was part of me.

Now my brain has slowed down…. Boy has it slowed down. Enough that I’m very aware of it. Not just my reaction time — as in driving or trying to catch something falling off the kitchen counter. But in how quickly I see things; whether I can recall the names of public figures I have known about for decades; or even the periodic correct word for a situation. I have always been proud (I use that word guardedly because I do try not to let hubris rule, but to be confident that my word choice was appropriate for the situation) that I could put together an intelligible sentence. I know I don’t always follow the rules but then not following rules has pretty much been my one rule of life. I’ve always been a loner, independent and a bit stubborn.

P.D. James would have say that we develop our style by doing one simple thing: just doing it. That is so true not only of writing but also of life. Over a lifetime — I’m now working on my 76th year — we begin to appreciate diversity and the idea that we can all live our life in our own way, we can have our own style which sort of happens when we just give in and let our brain and our body do the things that they do naturally.

I had a mother who was tied to her mother’s apron strings till she died. She wanted desperately for me to be tied to hers. I know that in my late teens and early 20’s I gave her a great deal of heartache by resisting and insisting on being my own person. When I married she wanted my wife to be tied to her apron strings. She wasn’t happy then either when I snipped the strings and put an end to endless expectations. As a result we fully enjoyed — all of us — a great many years of harmonious life thereafter — with just a relatively short period of angst and gnashing of teeth.

I know a lot of people who never take the step of asserting themselves. I’m not talking about ugly self-obsession. You don’t need to make enemies just doing your own thing. Then again in a very diverse world I suspect that the diversity of the other people in our lives means that some of them aren’t going to be easily convinced that we need to be a different way than they want for us. Yeah — those kinds of situations are hard and the route I took wouldn’t work for everyone — but that’s life, right? We have to find out what works for US. Not what works for someone else.

The upshot of all this is that during my blog silence I’ve been fussing and fretting with myself about why I wasn’t writing. I could feel the ‘need’ but I had no motivation.

I guess that’s where today’s thought really end up. Living my life meant that I had things to sort out — to process. Some of those things leant themselves to words — the occasional blog post — others didn’t — weeks of silence. Seeing as I have never tried to monetize this blog it didn’t make any difference it one person read the blog or 1000 people read it. I wasn’t losing money, and in fact more people have checked in on the blog during the quiet times than I ever would have guessed. After all, it’s just the meanderings of an aging geezer.

If you have a blog — in the days of VLOGS when not as many people want to be bothered actually keyboarding their thoughts when they could just talk into a camera — and it bothers you that you aren’t getting out as many posts — don’t worry about it. Let your body and mind do what they need to do to be happy; if you do you’ll be rewarded with newfound creativity and inspiration.

If you have a blog that you need to make money from — good luck (he says semi-sarcastically). The world changes. What worked 1 year ago may not work today. Just think of the screw machine invented back there in the 1800’s. The job of making screws was the purview of the blacksmith and that machined killed 5000 years of on-the-job seniority. Competing against vlogs and Tik Toc, and Insta, and X is a challenge and perhaps what you have always done wont cut the mustard. Just adding more clickbait gets to a point where there is too many commercials to make it worth one’s while even going to the website. I know there are a lot of blogs I no longer visit because they are saturated with advertising and lack content. Or they are just copies of someone else’s text and contain nothing new or original at all. You have to give people a reason to visit.

Anyway…. a long blog for a short topic.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.