The End is the Beginning

I think a lot about the "whys" in life. Earlier in my life, it was born out of a need to do everything right and please as many people as I could. What's safer than having everyone love you? They'll fight for you, think of you, and even do all the things that you expect that you're not asking them for! (or so went my thinking).

My deep questioning these days comes from a place of true interest and curiosity. The surprising part is the curiosity extends even outside myself and I've been interested in discovering more the nuances in people, even the ones closest to me.

It's in this deep examination that I found myself questioning what my website was. What was I was intending to put out into the world? If there was no real intent, how could I pull it more into alignment with how I like to live life? My meditation practice is really showing itself here because each time I would come back to the site I felt like something was wrong. Yes, it looked pretty close to my vision...but it wasn't a place that I, myself, would come back to regularly. In this way, the blog was just as mysterious as life. Not to mention, the upkeep for all the custom stuff I wanted to do was getting unwieldy.

So we're going back to basics.

I started this blog with the intent to share all the things that I love including musings, sayings, insights, movies, games, and music. There is nothing more that gets me singing than sharing what I've learned, connected to, and love with anyone who's interested so I'm going to get back to that.

Dear Diary

The longer I journal, the more I find it's pretty revelatory.

I have been keeping journals ever since I was a teenager. I had a lot of feelings and I remember thinking, mostly because of my deep love of music and how it spoke to me, that I should try writing. I wrote poems, and did some journaling during my roughest periods but I didn't tend to write much when I was happy. Even in writing this now, I can see how that spoke to a deeper lever of how I was dealing with things.

I kept up my journaling in late high school, then moving to the computer when we finally got one in our house. I was obsessed with that computer. An obsession to led me to work in technology to this day...but it also allowed me to easily write long form journal entries without my hand cramping.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one, because I've never felt the need to share this with anyone until now, but my hand cramps really easily when I right. I might have poor grip strength...but I'm actually pretty sure that's not it. I can remember feeling this since I was a kid. I think I was told once that I was taught to grip the writing utensil too firmly which I believe. Sucks though because it's not an easy thing to retrain yourself how to write.

One of the things I've loved most about keeping a journal electronically was the ability to keep incalculable entries and to easily reference them. As a deep analytical thinker, I am constantly pulling up things in the catalog in my head and taking strolls through the halls of. my knowledge. It's one of the reasons I could see my knowledge of music, tv, and tech has developed the way it has. I love the feeling of digging into my knowledge and making connections.

I took one of those strolls this morning reflecting on this current moment in my life, a new big journey. When I'm in these moments, great ends or beginnings especially, I like to jump back to years past on this day and see what I wrote. Incredibly, I find that I'm amazing to writing deeply how I feel and making amazing conclusions. There is an intuitive nature to my writing, even this, where I like to let it flow and just publish as is.

I bet this intuitive quality is something that journaling brings out in all of us.

The Elements of Freedom

I’ve been working hard on updating this little site with all this crackling energy that’s been coursing through me over the past few days. Many of these changes are ones I’ve envisioned since the beginning, and seeing then realized has been pretty impactful for me.

I have been hesitant to tell some folks about it because I’m afraid they won’t feel it’s as special, or as good, as I do but my inner voice keeps reminding me of why I did this in the first place: so I’d have a place, all my own, to share myself. Not Instagram. Not Facebook. Not GoodReads. Just me.

Past me would have let that fear stop him from action, but now I do it anyway as a test. A test to see if my imagination and the story I wrote about what's going to happen was actually true. Spoiler alert, I'm better at writing a story that blocks me from action than I am at predicting the future. I'm constantly surprised at how different life is when it's lived and not just forecasted. Walking into this unknown has given me a real sense of freedom from the trappings of what my own mind can do to get in my way by trying to protect me.

As tends to happen to me, a beautiful lesson floated right in front of me in the form of an Instagram post by one of my faves, Morgan Harper Nichols, and her beautiful words struck right at the heart of what I was thinking and going through.

Credit: Morgan Harper Nichols

If I could called anyone a "lightworker", or someone who consistently shines a light on my journey through life, it is Morgan. I am grateful for the lesson she's helping with me with this chilly morning.