Excursions

I am on a #30day challenge of not accessing any of the social timelines and have signed out from them in all my browsers. I will continue to post to my blog, and hence cross-post to Twitter. But to aid myself to stay away from timeline, I won’t access the mention page either. So, no replies.

I want to understand what impact the timelines have on my focus — I have been struggling with that since the last few months. It’s time to take some action.

Are social media timelines the only cause? I’m sure they are not. But my intension is to find out if they are one of the causes and to what extent.

I do intend to catch up on the blog feeds though, and for the next 30 days, I will have to use emails to both send the responses. You, too, can send any responses to my posts through email here.

Ben wrote a wonderful post suggesting, reminding, that everyone should blog, should write. I always connect, and have done so for long, with this specific sentiment.

There’s no such thing as writing too much: your voice is important, your perspective is different, and you should put it out there.

This reminded me of a post I had written that shared a similar sentiment — we all can, and should, write. This particular passage that I had written, unfortunately, still holds true for many.

It’s saddening to see people resist the efforts to pen the words they think of. They go after what others have written, beautiful nevertheless, but at the cost of it being not real, fake. They underestimate the power of conveying one’s own feelings in whichever way possible. The words, their structure won’t matter much then. And that is one way one can start writing.

Today’s posts mark the completion of 30 days of daily posting on my blog. It wasn’t a planned challenge. But I wanted to attempt a routine, in public, of sorts. Prone to miss at least a day occasionally, a streak of any kind is always difficult for me. Plus, a good thing is that I didn’t have to schedule any posts just to make sure I don’t skip a day. I had written all the posts on the day they are visible on the blog. Well, in Indian Standard Time, that is. Even the long-form essays.

With post-a-day done, can I take up another 30-day challenge? I always wanted to post at least a picture every day. But, I am not too much into photography. Or rather, I am not good at it. Plus the worsening environment outside with Omicron in the air, it becomes a tad more difficult to find different places every day. What else?

I’m finding it a lot hard recently to focus on any form of writing. I’m making it unnecessarily difficult. In the push to write good, thought out posts, I am not writing anything at all. Thoughts, they are abundant. I need to make sure I unburdened the mind of them, in time.

It’s crazy how one’s mind works. Here are two posts separated by 4 years. I recently published one a couple of weeks back. I had published another in 2017. Both the posts talk about a similar observation, about the constant fight between the coder and a writer in me. It reads in such a similar manner. The choice of words, the structure, the flow. It should be pretty apparent to anyone who reads it that both the posts come from the mind. From the same author.

Surprisingly, when I wrote the recent post, I had no clue that I had written about the same topic earlier some time. In a way, then, the adage that “there’s no original work being written, but just rewrites” is not that far off.