Reflections on Writing

When one needs to talk about plans but not results, they often tend to be boastful, blissful and even very pompous - VA

In the context of writing my blogs, I will explain back why I began this blog with that opening line in the last part of the blog! But before that, please refer to my blog Why I Write written almost 2 years ago with fanfare. In this blog, I will explain my thoughts on my previously shared or unshared thoughts prevalent while beginning blogging and how it relates to the opening!

One of my thoughts in favour of writing then was that I have to make permanent memories. I tend to take up some habits on my own to make my time pass nicely such as new sports, developing something new like an app/website, picking up a skill like a ukulele/skating, among others. And since they have been ephemeral mostly, in terms of my memories, say I don’t remember my challenges from the top of my head which I faced while learning skating. I used to feel I am losing out on my life and not recording it as I grow. Now, after this writing spree, a reality check is that I still lose out to blogger so many things that I do daily. It is virtually impossible to capture exhaustive knowledge from my life by a writing unless I take daily notes on what I did, whom I talked to, topics of discussion, etc. Writing that raw data will be not just verbose but also very difficult to extract meaningful life lessons from! So, my original goal to immortalize my ephemeral thoughts largely remains untouched, unfulfilled and even stale from my own thought process now!

One of my feelings was that my words are very out-of-the-world or unrelatable types and give a feeling of आख़िर कहना क्या चाहते हो। to readers and listeners. Looking back I don’t have much recall of how and why exactly I felt it! Maybe it was someone who said something negative once and I took it dearly as feedback to improve my communication skills which gave me a refuge to improve my writing. Given, I keep a hard stick for my self, I can only claim this as a partial success. I stick to writing a not-so-lengthy blog and even shorter than 1K words essay at times. Many times I followed a set format (especially tech blogs) because I am lazy and slacker to save time and effort. Overall, this is still a partial success since my writing and typing speeds have improved significantly, albeit only in short format writing. I may still struggle to write long sized mails or vision documents or complicated chats or organize discussions in meetings.

Now one purer thought was inspired by my childhood feelings to contribute back to society by sharing all the knowledge I have and that no knowledge rather small or menial is bad. It can only bring value to the reader. It is one thing to explain things with much fanfare to someone and its another deal to paint a picture that audiences expect lofty results. Looking back, I feel it was rather kiddish of me to believe that my sharing is super important for the readers. I was so naive that I put a Facebook pixel to track the user traffic at my self-claimed soon-to-be world’s highest user traffic website. Although I put up another blog on how I set up my free blogging website to inspire others from doing so, I now feel my thought to share some useful comprehensive knowledge was at a tangent from reality. It would be countable days when I saw double-digit user traffic on my website most of which would be me and my lady (or to be whatever..).

Now, touching back on the starting line, you can guess the order of magnitudes by which I was boastful that I would capture all the thoughts as it occurs in my brain like a printer, and I was blissful because I was oblivious to any failures, almost sure to gain something out of it and had no benchmark of how much I would like to continue blogging and pompous to claim in my first blog that my blogs may see considerable traffic someday.

Not everything is sad in any story, I will also share some that I felt were new and good experiences inspired by writing. First, I felt great that I delivered around 50+ blogs in 2 years, which is one blog every 2 weeks on average. I consider myself satisfied with this rate of content delivery. Second, I successfully picked up blogging as a new (and an exciting one indeed) habit in my life. I see it as a skill to sharpen rather than the pressure to do-a-thing! Lastly, when I look at the past 2 years, I don’t remember much but I do remember the key initiatives I undertook and because of blogging I can look into the blogs whenever I want and I can relive those moments. I felt proud to not have been stopped by not having a website of my own. I can say I built my website from scratch and write a bunch of blogs and I maintain it as well. Beat this!