I am horrified to find that it has been 9 months since my last post. I can give the usual excuse, that I have been busy, but as a teacher of mine was always fond of saying, "Busy people always have time."
In other words, the people who make excuses for not doing something are likely making excuses for not doing many other things. People who are truly busy are busy precisely because they are willing to take on a lot.
The older I get the more convinced I am that success in life comes not to the brightest and the most talented, but to those willing to work hardest. And the key is not simply the expenditure of energy, but the efficient expenditure of energy. That efficiency part is has eluded me my whole life.
At any rate, I have decided to make a new effort. I've found a new blog editor, MarsEdit, which seems to make creating posts a lot easier. And like most Americans, I operate under the assumption that if I have an intractable problem the solution is to buy something. America, after all, is in a country with a massive industry devoted to selling people exercise equipment to be placed, unused, in basements and garages.
One reason I abandoned posting is because I ran out of things to say. Not speaking when you don't have anything to say is a forgotten art, and there is a certain dignity in it. Millions are pouring words by the gallon into the internet, and how much of it, after all, is worth reading? I haven't read every word Shakespeare wrote. If I can't do that, it is not fair for me to expect that anyone would want to read every word I spout off. That's what personal journals are for. Only the best of my personal journal entries should end up here.
That leads to my second reason for reticence: a tendency to perfectionism. A blog could be a raw product. It could be uncensored, stream of thought. Mine isn't. I can't produce anything, not even a note to be tacked on the refrigerator, without proofing. In looking at my old posts, I did make some mistakes, and there are many sentences that I could have phrased differently and better, but even still, none of them passed into cyberspace without several levels of editing. Editing takes time. It makes daily posting far more difficult.
But I don't want to stop writing, even in an age when online posting is migrating to Facebook and rendering the blog, amazingly enough, more and more anachronistic. I wear a bow tie to work every day and am a practicing Roman Catholic, so I have no fears about anachronism.
Consider this a rededication. And if it doesn't work, it's only because I am too busy.