Keeping On

I wasn't really paying attention, but last Friday marked 17 years, to the day, that I've been writing this weblog. (It was even a Friday when I made my first post.) It's been an interesting time. What's interesting about it is that despite the fact that I pretty much make it a point to post often enough to ensure I hit 13 posts a month (a decision I made after January of 2007) it hasn't come with a sense of being disciplined about it, even though I suspect that this is precisely how many people would see it. It's just something I do, and other aspects of my life have simply flowed to fit around it. In fact, I don't have much of a sense of it at all. At a Christmas dinner yesterday, I was asked what I've been doing with myself, and despite all of the time that I spend wandering the World Wide Web in search of things of interest, drafting (and sometimes abandoning) topics and writing and posting things here, none of it came to mind when I went to answer the question. It's just sort of faded into the background of things.

But I suppose that, in the end, this is what one wants discipline to be like. The activity stops being something that one has to actively fit into their day on a regular basis, and it just becomes something that one does, almost as if it were a part of oneself. At its worst, it can feel like a compulsion, or even an addiction, in the sense that I start to become a bit put out when I don't attend to it regularly enough. It nags at me, and drags my attention back to itself when I would rather be doing other things. But again, it's possible that this is a feature and not a bug.

I've decided, time and again, that I wouldn't use Nobody In Particular as a place to complain about the world and/or people in it. I've pretty much given up on that. I, like a lot of people, I think, tend to be somewhat more attuned to the negative things that I encounter in my life than the positive. One thing that I would like to do, however, is delve more deeply into philosophy, just because I find the subject interesting. I'll also have to get out with my camera(s) more. I've started to notice that I don't shoot as much as I used to, and that tends to be more positive activity than being irritated with current events and the coverage thereof. So it's on to year 18 of this activity. It hasn't done what I'd set out to do with it, and I'm not really sure anymore what it does, but it's still been a worthwhile part of my life.