I didn't feel like blogging today, so I did

17 Jul, 2026

Well, coming into today's session, I immediately noticed that after a long two weeks of a lot of upheaval, writing for myself every day, and training for this god damn marathon more than I have ever trained for anything in my life; that I had approximately nil to write about. But, I am a stubborn person and have started to learn the tricks of the brain when it comes to being able to force creativity.

So, I fired up our trusty bearblog.dev Discover page in search of some inspiration and serial blogger extraordinaire, Robert Birming, had delivered exactly what I needed in desperate times. "Don't feel like blogging today? Do it anyway."¹ It's not so much that I don't feel like blogging, more that I'm just drained. It's incredible what we can do to distract ourselves from the realities that need dealing with and these two weeks have been part that, and part completely focusing on trying to discover what I want to do with my life going forward.

Have you ever sat down and tried to figure out your life? If so, you've done a far sight better than me on figuring out your own path, your own destiny. I've usually pushed the tiller most of my life towards the "whatever happens, happens, and it was probably for a good reason" path, and while I'm not a determinism purist, I do, however, think we are a lot more hands-off than we think. I'm usually happy to accept that, albeit trying to nudge myself towards things I care about as I go.

This last two weeks required me to invest a lot of time actually trying to decide what to do in my personal life and it's been a lot. Maybe that's why I feel drained from writing today, especially for an audience, because the raw state of what has been coming forth onto my screen these last days is hard to temper, and a part of me wants to just revert to that, hit publish, deal with the aftereffects of too much sharing, and yolo myself down the next path.

What has been most precious to me in these two weeks is how much writing I've done. Approximately 8,000 words of self-therapy, a daily reflection on my day and trying to chart my course. It's been wonderful. I find myself in a physical space currently different from where I normally am and all I have here is a backpack, my ancient Lenovo Thinkpad (with a god-tier keyboard), and enough alone time to be able to document myself. As the days go past I have found my writing to go deeper and deeper, and my memories of important events have flooded back. Some good, some bad, all useful in my current context.

Did I figure out where to go next, you might be wondering? I'm not sure. It seems that as much as one can think about a topic of great importance (to me, that is), there's only so far thinking will get before outside influence needs to guide you in some way or another. So it's best to put yourself in a position where you can come to a conclusion, and then, you lay in the river and let it carry you downstream.

#2026 #life