Blog On, Garth

March got a little hairy, and April wasn't much better. I was kind of embarrassed to pick up again after six weeks. But an incident the other day changed my thinking. A coworker of mine just got her book published. On her new website she talked about going to writers' retreats. I looked up one of the retreats she described, and there was a workshop that sounded interesting. So I looked up the instructor's website. She was a successful freelance writer with a published book, teaching at a respected retreat center…and her last blog post was on December 10, 2010.

Her book was a memoir about her yoga practice and how it taught her to accept the messy ad hocness (my word, I'm sure she could do better) of life. So I thought, "Hey, I do yoga, I write, I get overwhelmed by life and go ages without penning so much as a blog post. I'm practically a pro. So accept the mess and blog on.
Of course, any excuse will get me doubting. So this is also a good time to ask the question, "Why?"
For me, one reason is that daily practice of any skill is worthwhile. Yoga, meditation, martial arts, sports, music, writing and just about anything you care about enough to do well are all improved by daily practice. I write everyday at work, but there is real value (I think) in writing about topics you pick yourself. Blogging lets you test ideas, and at the same time build discipline in your practice. When I started blogging earlier this year, I thought it would be a chance to have more than just a passing thought about some of the Big Questions of Life that I am usually to busy for since having kids. But a couple of weeks in, it became pretty obvious that all of my questions are pretty much about my kids.

So be it. Accept the mess and blog on. Mommy bloggers are much mocked, and I know that there a lot of pretty bad blogs out there. But I think the mockery stems as much from latent sexism as from any inherent lameness in the genre. Blogging allows a group of people who can be pretty isolated a way to communicate and connect with others. It can be a vital outlet for creativity and self expression. It can generate income for some of the better or more savvy in the group. And it fits into a lifestyle that doesn't have a lot of room to fit much more of anything.

This may be just another messy mommy blog, but I will continue to broadcast from my basement, rich in movie references and shallow in Deep Thoughts.

Blog on, Garth.