A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
It’s almost 60 degrees outside and I’m sitting on the stairs in the backyard soaking up the sun, watching shadows shift imperceptibly towards the east. Snow half-covers the backyard and a few deer are sleeping on it in the corner, blissfully unaware that their bed is transforming beneath them. Slightly squinting my eyes at an angle to the sun produces rainbows. My mom is on a real estate call in the room just inside and I can hear her talking. The wind picks up here and there. I feel wonderful. Winter is over and the days of being cooped up inside are soon to be in the past.
Very cliched symbolism, but it is also time for me to make a change with this blog. Originally, the plan was to post 1000 words daily for 100 days, with the idea being that it would circumvent any fears I had about publishing what I thought online, and also be daunting enough of a word count to not allow me to overthink it. I’ve gotten what I wanted from that initial experiment, and now I just feel annoyed more often that not that I have to post ideas before having the space to fully develop them. So we’re gonna go weekly. Not nearly as big of a change to build up the suspense for, eh? Too bad. Every blog has elements of self aggrandization, and sometimes you gotta just lean into it.
Nobody asked, but what did I learn from writing ~40k words in 40 days? I guess that… I kind of like writing? Looking back, it’s easy to confirmation bias myself into that view, as I really enjoyed English literature (particularly poetry) in high school and of course love languages. But also, I’m pretty sure that if I had selected drawing or painting or making video games or whatever as the object of this challenge, I would have found that I liked that too. Everyone has the need to create and share. This is an obvious view if you spend more than 30 seconds looking at the world around you, but taking the time to really feel it internally was worth it.
Another impact this forcing-myself-to-write experiment had on me, which I didn’t like as much, was that it put me into perennial blog post brain. Everything you experience is seen from the lens of how it fits into a 1000 words essay. It’s hard to avoid and of course is a very beneficial perspective if what you really want to do is write things. I had this feeling at the start as well, but I’m pretty certain that at this point in time I don’t *only* want to be a writer. Nothing against writers of course, but that’s not me at this point in my life. I see the value in it, enjoy it, and plan to continue at a ~weekly cadence, but I don’t think this can be my only contribution. So it’s time to keep trucking and try more things.
There’s a beautiful arc in Ping Pong the Animation (GOAT anime) where one of the minor minor characters is a ping pong player who gets absolutely destroyed by one of the main characters early on in the series. I mean, annihilated. He has a very melancholy personality and quits ping pong to go find himself. He tries the sea for a period of time, followed by the mountains. Eventually, by the end of the series, he winds up back at the same tournament he got destroyed at a year later and, on a whim, decides to watch.
See you next week.