To Blog or Not To Blog?

Apparently,  that question has been asked almost as many times as the original quotation has been requoted.  I usually ask Chari some version of this about twice a year -- usually June and January, when I'm rethinking my systems.  

Some answers to the question:

This one is inspiring:

The first step is to begin. .....
Somewhere along the way – say the third or fourth post – your blogging voice will strike a balance. It will glimmer with sincerity; it will not take itself or its aims too seriously; it will ignite in the writer her passion for language; it will prove to the reader that language is as life-giving and expansive as it is delicate and detailed. It will bend in a way that it could not, or would not have allowed itself to, in a staid Microsoft Word document, or on an all-too-inconsequential legal pad.

Here's one directed to authors, but lists some notable author's blogs -- might be fun to browse through.

Here's a Top 5 Reasons Why People Blog.   The top reasons are:   for fun, for networking/support, for a business or cause,  for journalism (info sharing, I suppose), or for education.  

My reasons seem to change quite a bit, and even my topics seem to change over time.   Sometimes when my reasons or topics are shifting, I don't know quite how to deal with it, and I stop blogging for a while.

When Chari and I discussed this once again a couple of weeks ago (she was doing her walk, and I was scrubbing the baseboards, while we talked on the phone) I asked her about expectations.   What do we expect from ourselves in regard to blogging?

The answer was basically, that we blog without expectations, for ourselves or for others.  That doesn't mean we're slackers -- we both take care to write things as best we can, even though it handicaps us sometimes, and we both love to hear from readers.     But we try not to write for extrinsic motivations, but from ourselves.

Chari wrote here that we blog for our posterity.    This is directly true for her, but only indirectly true for me.   My daughter reads my blog, but my sons don't.    However, I write to remember things and to think them out, and this probably indirectly benefits my progeny.      I write to keep myself mindful, if a Catholic can use that pop-psych and slightly Zen concept (I think the essential concept is very Christian, even the term is derived from somewhere else, but I don't want to go on that side tack right now ).

We blog to keep in touch with each other.

We blog because it's fun.

We planned some key topics when we started the blog, and you can see those in the category labels under the header.   I think when we started blogging I was hoping to share wisdom and experience, but Socrates has gotten in the way.    I know what wisdom looks like when I see it in other people and in books.   But I don't have it myself.    I pray to acquire it.   But it must be like what they say about patience -- you get patience by having your weak patience muscles exercised, and you get wise (at least it be nice to think so) by looking like a fool almost every day.    That would imply that humility is the road to wisdom, wouldn't it, but that's probably true about everything, indeed!

I think I was hoping to share Chari's wisdom!   Chari and I wrote a talk on homeschooling highschoolers a few years ago, and we were pretty happy with it, and it inspired us to start this blog together.    The talk allowed us a retrospective on what we had already done and what had happened.   But that talk was not the summit of our climb -- it was a waypost, and soon after that we were both again immersed in the chaotic details of everyday life.     Both of us had various momentous events concerned with our families of origin and our own families, both sad and happy.   Chari went back to full time work.  

So we aren't quite in that stage of life where we can talk wisely about the past.   The past and present are still incoming and mixed up together.    But we can still pick up some of the individual moments and examine them.  

All this is to say that we haven't dropped the blog, just taken a bit of a breather.  

I'm going to try to get back in the habit of regular posting, so I'm going to start a "blog every day" habit during the summer.   Chari and I agreed that not every blog post we publish has to be a full-scale essay.   Some can be like expanded Tweets or Statuses : ).      Though this one would be the hyper-expanded version.