Six months today exactly since I started blogging regularly. How much longer am I going to keep it up for? I keep saying this, don’t I? But then, most of the questions I ask on here are recurrent ones.
It has become a habit. Sometimes habits have value in themselves, and sometimes they are valuable because they impose order and discipline on the world, and some of them have outlived their usefulness, but we still stick with them because... they're habits Which is this one?
Well, I must be getting something out of it, or why would I keep coming back day after day? My attitude to my writing has changed, and maybe my attitude to my life, too. Is that a good thing? In many ways it’s a disturbing thing. But things have changed not only because I’m writing about them, my external life has been very different over the last six – make that nine – months from what it was before, mostly because of being involved with the European project. That time is probably coming to an end, officially it already has for the current phase, though there is now the trip to Hungary which is a follow up, and potentially some work on the website, (but I still haven’t heard about that.) Surreality has taken a central role in my life, and some things have shifted, but will there be any deep, long-term changes? What about when the travelling and excitement is over, and life falls back into its old rhythms? What will I be left with then?
I don’t know any of the answers. Things that happen in life trigger other things, and so it goes. ‘Fallen leaves in the night, who can say where they’re going?’ (Roxy Music, makes a change from John Lennon!). Or even better: ‘Words like scattered leaves/Stopped in mid-fall/Into the streams/Of fast-running rivers/Of choice and chance’ (David Crosby). Rivers of choice and chance, I love that image We fall into the rivers, and how can we know where they will take us next?
For too long, it seems, my flow has been stopped by dams and logjams, and I have been caught by these eddies which whirl me round without taking me anywhere. Has blogging become part of that, or does it offer opportunities for freeing up the logs?
It’s about living life through words, which I always did, but previously in a much more private way. Now it is not exactly public, but a strange, half-way place, like nothing else I can imagine. A fantasy world which is intensely private, yet shared with who knows how many strangers? A bizarre kind of exhibitionism, where inhibitions have no place, where all those private thoughts can be taken out and displayed, to see if, perhaps, there’s someone else out there who will respond. And most of the time, of course, nobody does. But the potential is always there. And really, what would it take to make the logs shift, if they were nudged in the right place?