Blogging, changing, and bearing witness

Blogging for me is a way to mark the quieter but no less significant moments and movements in my life. The traditional markers that we have are usually for the milestones, the popular, the public, the historical. Get married, and you’re the star of the week. Have a baby, and you are bombarded with well-wishers. Earn a degree, you get to be on the yearbook and in the march. Publish a book, and you’re in the promotional write-ups. Win an award, and you’re practically everywhere. Those things are rather hard to miss. But what about the things that happen to us without the benefit of a witness or any pomp and circumstance? Such as finishing reading a really difficult but essential book, or finally finding the last element to a work in progress that has long been missing, or even just successfully cleaning out one’s junk after a long, long time. It could be about finding an old memento and the memories they bring back. It could also be about something not so insular, such as meeting a long-lost friend, some thoughts on a movie, impressions of a visit to an art exhibit, taking a walk.

It’s natural to write about these things in our diary, since a diary is an attempt to catch the fleeting moment and make sense of things, and we all need that kind and level of introspection. But when we begin to blog about certain things that we usually keep in private in our diary, we are effectively making a declaration that our introspection is relevant to society, and that we feel that we have something to say that should be paid attention to. A blog can be a kind of drum roll, perhaps, or it can be a coin into the well of discourse, or simply an invitation for others to be witness to our life. It’s human nature to seek acknowledgement; it’s human nature to want to reach out.

Being a writer, I came into blogging late, and I began my blog without any plans or expectations whatsoever. I began it when the year 2005 was about to end, and I thought I would just wing it. After a couple of weeks worth of posts, I thought it might be fun to attempt to join my two great loves, writing and physics, in my blog. The former is a public love, and its presence in my life has defined how people have been perceiving me for years. The latter is a secret love, born a little later in me, but has nevertheless lived in me long enough for me to know that I would make sacrifices for it if need be. Those kind of posts lasted only a couple of months, as my readings in physics had to give way to the more mundane routine everyday things and issues. Now my blog has become a blog of love and reading and love of reading and about reading as a writer and about writing for love, and about tools for writing and my love for these, and my blog has become nothing like it was when it began.

This changeability, this ease of transformation, is any blog’s greatest strength. My blog will change again into something else, announcing moments, sounding my drum roll, inviting people to be witness to my life and to my attempts at making sense of things.

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