Thirty days of continuous blogging

One year, or even one month back, if someone told me that I would someday be celeratign 30 days of continuous blogging, I would have laughed out loud. Blogging, I always maintained, was as far removed from me as flying is from dogs. Yet, dogs do routinely fly on commercial aircrafts, and have even gone into space, and I have been cheerfully blogging for 30 days.

Why do I blog? Not for any of the obvious reasons why people blog –
- to reach out to an audience – the only person who regularly reads my blogs is my mother, and the time I spend writing blogs actually cuts into the time I would otherwise spend talking to her
- to put my views across – not exactly, I do not delude myself that I have any earthshattering views that need to be conveyed, and even if I do, I am not sure if this is the forum I would choose for expressing them
- to convey something or chronicle my life– my blog entires are mostly musings; nothing at all to convey or chronicle

WHY THEN DO I BLOG?

The answer goes back a few years.

Before I took a three-year career break (four years, if you include a year of part time employment as a part of the break), I was in professions where the need to communicate to an external audience was a necessary attribute of the job. I was good at that – I could make presentations to groups ranging from one to fifty where every person though I was talking directly to him, my written reports were to the point and free from ambiguities, and I could conduct meetings as well as the next person. I wrote a lot in the years when I was supposedly a full-time mother – fiction mostly, but fiction that was appreciated by anyone I showed it to.

So, when I recently joined a start-up, I quite naturally volunteered to write the static web-text. I spent hours working on it, but was anything but happy with what I was churning out. There was no clarity in what I was pretending to say. The sentences, thought, grammatically correct, contradicted each other. There text just did not flow.

I plodded on for a couple of weeks, making only incremental progress. Then one evening, I went for a run, and somewhere in the process of generating all the sweat, I had figured out exactly what I wanted to say and how to say it.
That day and the next, I accomplished more than I had in all the previous weeks, and at the end of those few hours of work produced something I was reasonably happy with.

From that incident came the realization that it was not enough to vaguely be aware of things – your thoughts can totally crystallize only when you organize them logically and put them down on paper. So I decided to do that on a regular basis, in order to bring some discipline into my brain.

Why an entry a day, everyday? For the same reason – discipline. Unless I committed myself to a rigid schedule, it would have been far too easy to miss one installment, use that to justify not doing the next one on time, and before you knew it, the scheduling would have gone completely haywire.

And if I was committing myself to a piece a day, why not put them in a blog?


Thus was born “Coffee Rings Everywhere” – and here I am faithfully blogging away.

It would be nice to know if anyone has read this far. Have you?