It can happen at any time in your life. It might be a single day, or even a birthday. It could be a birthday on a significant year like 10, 20, 40, 60, or even 80. It is that moment when you ask yourself, “Who am I really?”

What defines you? What is it that makes you the unique individual you are?

At ten, it is your passion for school, friends, and likely some toy or collection of toys. It could also be our interest in a subject that we announce to the world as our future job description. “Tommy loves airplanes.” “Sally wants to be an astronaut.” “Malik is so friendly and outgoing, I just know he’s going to be class president.” “Amy is going to be in the World Cup some day, I just know it.”

At twenty, life gets complicated. You are defined by your education, your work experience, what little you may have, and, in a twisted sense, what you will be when you grow up. Decisions at twenty may define you for the rest of your life. You may think it is all about the last call for playtime, but these are the years that make or break those ten year old dreams and passions.

At thirty, responsibility weighs heavy on those passions. They define you. You are the renter, the mortgage payer, the employee, the parent, the spouse, the partner, the worker, the bill payer. Any ten year old fantasies of the future are shoved under the load of bills stacked on your desk.

At forty, you are still the bearer-of-responsibility, but life is a little different, maybe. If you let it. You now understand the balance of time, money, and energy. Bills are mostly paid and you’ve learned to do with enough plus save a little bit more. You take days off rather than work yourself into a complete collapse, and appreciate the downtime, even though you may still shove it full with a list of never-ending tasks.

At fifty, the bearer-of-responsibility has an even greater appreciation of time, money, and energy, and the lack of each one. Balance shifts and you want more free time, but work still must pay the bills.

At sixty, you see a light at the end of the working tunnel and your priorities shift and change. If you had kids, most are either out of the house or rebounding. Money is usually figured out, what little you may have, and you are now more interested in what you are doing outside of work as much as you are in work itself. You are more involved in the community, more generous with sharing your time and energy, and if health permits, starting to pay more attention to what your body needs to keep going another few decades.

At seventy, time, money, and energy have now shifted. You are more selective about your interests, more patient with yourself and others. Health issues become more important, as does family. And this continues through to end of life.

Do these things define you? Are they representative of who you are? What happened to the astronaut, pilot, class president, and soccer player? What happened to your education that was supposed to take you further? What happened to the employee who served their company so well for many years? Are these who you are – or were?

Does your age define you? Do you define your age? Does your work define you? Or did you define your work? Does your hobby define you or do you define your hobby? Does your family define you or did you define your family?

What defines you? Blog about it? Share it.
How does that which defines you change how you blog? Does it? How? Tell us.

When blogging became a word that led to an industry, the most common words thrown around to define and describe blogging were trust and authenticity.

Where are those words today?

Today, we live in a world that not only thrives on producing fake news, but feeding on it. Instead of rejecting fake news out of hand, our leaders reject the legitimate news sources as “fake news” when they don’t like what’s written or said.

In the beginning, trust was so important that Google adopted a concept known as TrustRank in their algorithm for search results and ranking. It was based upon the theory of six degrees of separation combined with “trust who you know.” Specific sites, and mine were among them, were classified as trustworthy. Any site we linked to or linked to us should be considered also trustworthy. Any site that linked to that site should be considered trustworthy as well, but get closer to four, five, or six sites that link to sites that link to sites that linked to trustworthy sites, then the trust factor was reduced. Websites were determined to be as trusted as possible to earn that respect, and rise like cream to the top.

Authenticity was a part of our jargon because we found in our initial research into what made a blog successful was intricately tied to not only the trustworthiness of the site, its author, and the content, but the integrity of the author, the producers.

We learned that people adored authors with a shared common interest, personal respect for themselves, their topic, and others, and kept coming back for more when the author connected with them on a personal level. Readers felt a kinship, friendship, a sense of bonding through shared experiences.

Commercialism moved in. The hunt for get-rich-quick schemes in blogging, poorly named monetization, led to greedy blogging. If you can’t make money, stop blogging. It ain’t worth it. Find the hook. Find the gimmick. Milk it for the money, then bail.

Then automation moved into blogging. It became easy to bookmark interesting sites you found on the web and have the bookmarking service, with a little JavaScript and PHP, generate a post for you with a list of links and automatically publish it on your site on a regular basis. You could spend a few hours finding interesting sites and tidbits to share, then parse the information out over weeks or months, generating money while you turn your attention elsewhere, away from your blog.

Then the blog echo chamber moved to a new level of low. It was always there, the ability to share and reshare content rather than generate original content. That takes time. It takes energy. It takes creativity. Why bother? Just regurgitate what you find on the web and people will think you are brilliant. The new low was the idea of curated content, sharing individual sites and tidbits as posts. WordPress called a version of this reblogging, taking others’ creative work and republishing an excerpt of it on your site, typically with no original content or thought to accompany it.

Then bots made it even easier. You didn’t even have to search the web for interesting information to publish on your site. Just set up the parameters of interests and let the program do all the work for you so you don’t even have to touch your website or social media channel.

What happened to trust and authenticity?

So little is authentic today. Plastic, fake, knock-offs. Even our food is plastic with artificial nutrients disguised with terms like “natural additives” and “processed from nature.” I don’t even know what that means.

Who can you trust today? Accusations of lies, fake news, and just made up shit flood our mental inboxes. A famous blogger was caught recently slipping in fake news amid legit news, breaking trust, in my opinion, but clearly acceptable to her, and possibly her fans. What’s a little oil leaking into the ocean of knowledge?

As you blog, consider these two words: trust and authenticity. They are still relevant.

In today’s world, I believe that trust and authenticity are differentiators. With such a flood of over-shared, unoriginal, and fake content, let your voice be the voice of reason, the trusted voice, the authentic voice. Let your words be yours, and your thoughts be your own.

You are a unique and powerful original human being. Use your voice for good and for you as you. Be you, the passionate you.

That is the most we will ever ask of you.

Kes: To be honest, I never want to see that part of myself again.

Lieutenant Tuvok: To which part are you referring?

Kes: To the part of me that got pleasure from destroying those plants in the airponics bay. To the part of me that was tempted to go with Tanis. I never realized I had such dark impulses.

Lieutenant Tuvok: Without the darkness, how would we recognize the light? Do not fear your negative thoughts. They are part of you. They are a part of every living being – even Vulcans.

Kes: You?

Lieutenant Tuvok: The Vulcan heart was forged out of barbarism and violence. We learned to control it, but it is still part of us. To pretend it does not exist is to create an opportunity for it to escape.

“Cold Fire,” Star Trek Voyager

I work with many clients recovering from terrible encounters and experiences on the web through their sites, site comments, social media, and site and business review services. Bullying, bad reviews, nasty comments, trolls, they are a part of the web today.

When people take the business of the web personally, it not only hurts, it shuts them down. One client took years to get back online after a single bad review on Yelp. Another couldn’t update their site for two years after receiving a mean comment. Another took comment spam personally, believing they were after him.

Without the darkness, how would we recognize the light. Light and darkness, good and evil, these extremes are a part of the human condition. We all have good days and bad days, and without the bad days, how would you know you were in a good day? Without evil, how would you feel blessed and strengthened by the good in your life?

“To pretend it does not exist is to create an opportunity for it to escape.” This is the key. When you deny, resist, shove down feelings, you are actually putting a cork in a bottle under extreme pressure. Cracks form and the ingredients ooze out. Or it will pop, often with disastrous results, leaving a huge mess.

By accepting equally the dark and the light in our world, we honor and respect both. We allow a balance to form between the two, neither under pressure.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I asked a friend how she was doing. “I’m going to have a good day today, damn it!” Her insistence on the good in the day was clearly a release of the pressure within. Until released and the balance is established, it is doubtful her insistence will moderate the quality of the day.

When you blog, are you blogging under pressure? Does that pressure influence what you say and share?

Take a breath and seek to find the balance again. Begin by acknowledging that the darkness must exist as much as the light. Respect it. Respect the process.

The Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh, teaches that anger is the energy required to take action, a transformative power, useful:

Just because anger or hate is present does not mean that the capacity to love and accept is not there; love is always with you…

When you are angry, and you suffer, please go back and inspect very deeply the content, the nature of your perceptions. If you are capable of removing the wrong perception, peace and happiness will be restored in you, and you will be able to love the other person again.

He often compares anger to the mud from which grows the lotus flower. Without the mud, the fertilizer as I call it, beauty does not grow. Thus, anger is useful.

While most people blame outside forces for making them angry, anger comes from within, an energy force. We can use it to hurt or help ourselves. For the people who blame social media or the response to their blog and social media efforts for their feelings, they are losing an opportunity to use the feelings as energy to transform not just themselves but the world with their positive actions.

Use your anger to bring love to the world, to bring balance between the light and the dark.

“Sometimes you’re trying so hard to get your life together and still it’s not enough, everything is falling apart. What to do, you’re asking. Just keep going through hell for yourself, not for everyone else. Richer with that wisdom, I will build my happiness from nothing. I will rise from the dust. And I will do it on my own. I will live for myself and I won’t look at the others.”
― Asper Blurry, Train to the Edge of the Moon

So many metaphors about recovering and rebuilding your life use the phoenix as the example. I like the idea of rising from the dust.

Rising from the ashes of the phoenix represents a half-way point in the downward spiral. You haven’t lost everything. There is enough in the ashes to lift yourself out of and return to the land of the living.

But the dust – dust is what people walk on. Dust is easily scattered to the winds. There is so little substance in dust, I feel like it is the lowest anyone can go, to feel like dust.

As a metaphor, dust represents age, death, the past. Sometimes easily swept away, other times requires a little more force to remove the layers upon layers, years upon years passing.

Be it ashes or dust you descend to, rise.

Let your passion lift you from the underworld to which you’ve drifted, lost.
Don’t feel the passion?

What have you done consistently all of your life? Do you collect or save things? What? Do you do the same thing every day because you want to not because you have to? What is that? What do you miss most when you aren’t doing it?

Among the answers is your passion, or the fragments thereof. Sift through them. What glitters? What still has a spark of energy attached to it? Find it. Lift it up. Examine it.

What makes it sparkle? Is it the thing or the doing? Is it the people who thrive around it? Or does it come from within you?

As Asper Blurry said, you keep going through hell for yourself. It’s time to now go through life for yourself. Rarely is nothing around you. It just feels like nothing. There is something I the nothing. Find it. Lift it. And follow it into the light of life.

“You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I was asked to present a workshop on family history blogging for a genealogy group. Normally I write an outline, incorporate material from past workshops, then turn to PowerPoint to put it all together. Instead, I opened PowerPoint and asked myself, “What do I really want to talk about to this group? What would interest me?”

I realized that I’d spent most of my life focused on pleasing others and not myself. What do they need? What will help them? For the first time in years, possibly decades, I asked myself “What do I need?”

As a genealogist-in-training since I was 10, I’m quite passionate about family history. I’m also very passionate about blogging and web technology. In my mind, while these could be related, they had little in common. I felt divided between my two passions.

The key phrase in that last paragraph was in my mind. I realized that I was my own worse enemy. I was getting in my own way.

I put the first slide into PowerPoint. Then the next. And the next. Over 200 slides later, I looked up and realized that the hour I’d allotted for this first draft slideshow had slipped into four hours, and I still had more to talk about. I was on fire. I worked for another few hours, ignoring other deadlines and client commitments, and woke up early the next morning for another four hours before my nagging sense of work ethic brought me back to those deadlines and clients.

The same thing happened, day after day. I’d steal time from everywhere in my life to keep working on that workshop slideshow. Chores piled up, but client work was completed, and rejected. I started to turn away client work, sticking only with specialized projects that brought me joy, referring clients to other qualified web developers, designers, and trainers for the general work. I became more selective about what I would say yes to, and improved my ability to say no to others. It was exhilarating.

I lost myself. I began to relax. I felt more hopeful, excited about the future. A road opened before me that was clear, focused, bricks laid firmly in my path a mile or two ahead rather than at the moment my foot stepped down in the fog. I could not only see where I was going, I was there, in the future, sure of the journey, map in hand.

It was extraordinary.

For several months, I gave myself permission to lose myself in this project. I had time before my workshop to play, and I did, discovering new interests, new angles, new perspectives on old ways of thinking. When I passed 1000 slides in PowerPoint, I knew I couldn’t stop. I think the total today is near 1800 and there is more to do, more to say, more to learn, more to share.

I found a way to link my two passions together, combining my vast experience with both in a fresh new way, and I’m loving it.

When was the last time you gave into your passion, relaxed, and just enjoyed yourself?

As Ken Kesey wrote in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” we could strain to see through the fog, or explore it with a different perspective. Relax. Enjoy it. Become lost in it.

I’ve found that when you become lost in something, it can embrace you.
Today, I’m embracing my passions more than ever before. Take a chance with me, and embrace your own. Get lost in them.

What would it look like it you could truly relax and lose yourself in something?

A student asked me what was the hardest part of blogging, and inspired an article series.

As I look over almost 30 years of blogging, it boils down to these four things that are the hardest part of blogging, learning to blog, and continuing to blog.

1. Finding stories
2. finding your voice
3. Finding your audience
4. Learning etiquette

In the first part of “The Hardest Part of Blogging” I want to explore the challenges of finding stories, finding something to write about. While this appears to be easy at first, it is hard in the long run to keep putting out content day after day. Along my 30 year journey into blogging, I’ve learned that it is harder than you might think to have too much to say.

Topic Too Big, Too Much to Write About

Students and clients come to me to ask what they should put on their blog. “What should I write about?”

I ask where their passion lies. What do they do that they know how to do very well, better than most people, that they have years of vested interest in, something they keep coming back to over and over again. I’ll often get an answer like photography, cars, rock collecting, travel, or an answer that appears to be narrow but isn’t such as loving downtown Portland, Oregon, or fishing.

These are huge topics. When a topic is vast, there are many things to write about, but you soon learn that there is too much to write about. It’s overwhelming. You don’t know where to turn, where to look, or which to choose. There’s just too much.

Stop. Narrow it down.

Using the example of photography, as a professional photographer I know well what a huge and diverse field it is. So what type of photography interests you? Is it nature, travel, macro, landscapes, black and white, color, digital manipulation…? If it is nature, what is it in nature? Is it flowers, bugs, wildlife, trees? if it is flowers, what kind of flowers? Wild, roses, daisies…the list of flower types is long.

If it is flowers, what is it about photographing the flower? Is it the flower itself in all its glory? Is it the challenge of photographing the flower in its native environment or working in a studio with it? Is it the lighting? The macro photography, getting so close you can see inside the flower? Is it playing with selective focus? Depth of field?

Keep drilling down. Down, down, and down again.

Let’s say what thrills you is the art of macro photography, close up and personal photography that plays with selective focus, turning a flower into artwork where what is in focus is as important as what is out of focus.

What could you write about that? There are the techniques, equipment, lighting, and decision-making process that goes into each step of the process. There are the artistic decisions and choices made to choose which point makes the ideal photograph to capture your intentions. Then there are others doing the same thing, and you can write about what they are doing and how they do it, celebrating your shared interest. You could possibly interview them.

As you keep exploring the narrow topic, you will find your mind expanding, finding more and more things to say about it. There is a sense of control, a sense of anticipation. You welcome each new discovery, each self-lesson, and you break it down into its tiniest bits to explore each step in detail on your blog.

Having too much to write about stops the writing, drains the interest with overwhelm. Narrowing the topic opens up a new world of possibilities.

Look Around You – Your World is a Book

There are some days when I feel like every step I take, I trip over a blog post idea.

Yet, this feeling doesn’t persist. I fight with it, letting my inner demons win more often than not. It is a day to day struggle to stay interested in the world around me. I know this applies to you as well.

Just like you can’t be up up up in spirit and good health on a daily basis, moods will come and go. Respect them but don’t let them control you.

Perhaps the most valuable result of an education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
Thomas Huxley

Persistence and self-discipline drives a good blogger forward to keep their eyes on the world around them, seeking content where they find it.

Learn to pay attention to details. Each detail is a possible post.

Learn to use your feeds and feed readers, setting them up to bring you content from around the world by subject, possible blog posts right to your door step.

Learn to ask questions and listen to others. They always have a story to tell that you might learn from and share.

Most of all, be patient with yourself. Finding something to say on a regular basis is a challenge, but a challenge you can handle.

Think Diary More than University Thesis

When it comes to finding content to blog about, consider yourself writing a diary or journal more than a thesis for a PHD. It should take years of research, study, fact-finding to publish a post. Who would read all that? There are times to be comprehensive on a topic, but more times to break that topic down into its smallest, essential bits, taking care to explain each one.

Keep it simple. Keep it brief. Some days you might write 200 words, others 10,000. You make up the rules as you go along, but break things down into small, digestible chunks and share them with the world as you learn and grow.

In the next in this article series I will cover the hardest part of blogging is finding your voice.

Today the world mourns one of our heroes in the Entertainment industry, a person who literally changed the world with one character played for three years in the 1960s, and in the never-ending Star Trek franchise for decades after, a character that came to represent the courageous, disenfranchised outcasts of our world and beyond. Even in the end, in the reboot Star Trek movies by J.J. Abrams, the character of Spock continued to represent the victims, survivors, outsiders, and brave spirits of today.

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”

As people around the world pay tribute to the amazing person and talent of Leonard Nimoy, I’d like to talk about how blogs around the world spring up daily to honor and grieve those whom have left this world too soon.

Such sites are tributes to individuals, families, and memorials. They serve to help people honor the lives lived, and the losses felt.

Many such sites serve to help the authors grieve and move through the process no matter how long it takes, often helping others in the process.

My humble tutorial here is not meant to be callous to those who start grief or memorial blog. It is designed to serve as a guide for starting one.

The Memorial Blog

The memorial blog is designed to honor an individual or group of people in death. There are many ways to do this through biographies, photographs, and stories.

Such a site is typically short-lived and static, serving as a virtual memorial marker telling the world that this person is too important to forget, and we shall not forget. Such sites are generally static in nature, using Pages to welcome the visitor and introduce the person and purpose of the site, a Page for biography, Pages for important accomplishments, image galleries, and other important information, plus a contact Page to allow friends and relatives to contact the family or host of the site.

One or more of the Pages will typically feature open comments for people to leave comments like a guest book. Many will set the site to have comments moderated or require a login before commenting to protect the site from spam.

Occasionally a memorial blog will be in blog format, covering a wide range of stories, tales, and photographs as the author pays tribute to the person.

The Grief Blog

A grief blog may be setup by someone grieving from an individual or group loss, and typically explores their grieving process rather than honoring a specific individual. The content might honor the deceased person, but the focus of the site’s content is on the survivor(s).

This site is typically presented in blog format, the content displayed in reverse chronological order, the most recent on top, or features a static front page and separate blog area for posts.

The categories of the post represent the topics covered by the author such as Recovering from Loss, The Grieving Process, When Someone Dies (what you need to know articles), Living Alone, etc.. Each site is different as is the grieving process.

The site may feature Pages with biographies, galleries, and other information including a Contact Page to help people connect and share their experience if desired.

When the Blog Ends

Humans are resilient and the grieving process moves on to a point when keeping such a site up is no longer an active part of a life. Energies are put elsewhere and interest wanes.

To end such a site, you may write a closing post and publish it, or leave a message on the front page or in the sidebar in a text widget, or just leave it stand as it is.

Should you leave a message that you’ve moved on? That’s up to you. Be appreciative to those who stood by you during the process and careful with close friends and family members that still may be grieving.

Ensure the site is either on WordPress.com or the domain and web hosting is paid for over a number of years to preserve the site, especially a memorial site. If you wish to move the site onto WordPress.com, simply export the content from the self-hosted site and import it into WordPress.com. Choose an appropriate WordPress Theme, customize it, and it will last indefinitely.

To Those Grieving

To those who are currently grieving and blogging, thank you. Thank you for sharing your loss, courage, and strength with us even on days when you think there is nothing left inside of you. You give us faith in the human spirit, and your words help us know that we are not alone. Grief should be a shared experience. Thank you for sharing.

And to all of us, live long and prosper.

He was bored.

We’d spent the prior evening putting together chairs from Ikea for my new dining room set and this morning, my little visiting friend was bored again.

I can’t remember ever being bored growing up. Not a single moment. I must have been, but I can’t remember. There were always books to read, trees to climb, forests to explore, creeks to splash in, wildlife to annoy, ditches to dig, forts to build, and imagination to wander. Anything and everything fascinated, from the wax melting down the side of a candle to the never-ending fantasy world of cardboard boxes.

Boxes! I pulled the remains of the chair boxes out from the recycle bin and stacked them on the driveway for my little buddy to use his imagination on. In my mind I saw the fortress of an old refrigerator box, castles, tunnels, paddling canoes down the wild Columbia River rapids, shelter from a storm, great building blocks.

My little friend saw only something to destroy, a great monster of cardboard to conquer and destroy. He’s such a male super hero in his flannel star-studded cape (aka snowflake blankie) and cardboard sword. A warrior. A super hero determined to save the world from the vicious cardboard monster in the driveway universe.

Later I went to a National Novel Writing Month event where we were to spend the night writing at the Portland Airport (PDX). I started off with great gusto, but as the night wore on, my demons crept in, threatening me. No longer was I inspired, writing with confidence and determination, my fingers flowing fast over the keyboard with brilliant and wise thoughts expressed. The whispers told me I was nothing, worthless, unable to write anything coherent let alone meaningful. That I was surrounded by all these creative folks flush with inspired imagination, possibly the next JK Rowling or Diana Gabaldon, all better than me. I was wasting my time and I might as well stop writing now – in fact, I should never type another word, the demons warned. I would never say anything anyone would want to read.

I wished I’d had that little boy’s courage to slash away at the stack of cardboard, saving the world one box at a time.

Ah, but I do!

I mentally put on my snowflake starred cape, grabbed a virtual cardboard sword, and started swinging, shredding the demons into scraps for the recycle bin.

We all need a little super hero in our life to help us fight off the dark forces, with our super hero power of imagination.

Just like the blossoms on the trees returning every Spring, so do we return to our passion over and over again, consciously and unconsciously. It is like a magnet, drawing us back to it. It’s pull is irresistible.

Sitting with a friend in a park a few years ago, sharing a moment of peace among the blossoming trees, she said, “I just can’t get this idea out of my head.”

“Then it’s time to share it so the weight is carried.”

She thought about that for a while as we watched a young child chase the blossoms falling like gentle snow flakes from the trees in the light breeze. “It started when I was a teenager…”

Slowly she poured the story out, of being told that her idea had no value, it would never make money, no one believing in her, losing faith not only in the idea but herself along the way. “But it won’t let go of me.”

“I don’t think you can let go of it.”

“I’m fifty years old. I can’t do anything about it now.”

“If it is still a worm in your ear, it will be there for a lifetime. Why aren’t you listening now?”

The peace was shattered by a skate boarder rattling through the park, whizzing by us, shirt tails flutter behind.

“It won’t let go of me until I do something about it, will it?”

That’s what passion is. We either listen to it and take action now or it will keep nagging us. Don’t let years go by. Listen to yourself. Listen to the voice inside of you begging you to pay attention. Your passion needs you, just as a child, kitten, puppy, or garden needs your attention to help it grow.

Blog your passion now.

Winter is here. A fine coating of snow covers the ground and all is white with an undercoating of green.

It’s winter in the Pacific Northwest.

A modern holiday song from Seattle spoke of “Christmas in the northwest is a gift God wrapped in green.”

This is a happy time for me, my woods adored in a white blanket, temperatures down to levels comfortable for me, torture for others, the damp welcomed in my spirit, gray skies with an occasional peek of sun, and a quiet peace within the forest as wildlife have moved on, and many others are napping.

I step out and the cat follows me through the snow to the mailbox. A ritual. A ritual beyond seasons. It’s more than a ritual, it’s a habit. A healthy habit.

I think of how my blogging habits are set by season and habit.

In summer, outdoor work requires my attention early in the morning. I’m often found in the dirt weeding and watering my precious garden that supplies me with most of the food I require from Spring to Fall, and even into early winter. By nine, the temperature is high and the sun drives me into my office to work until one in the afternoon when I take a two hour respite for food and anything that keeps my hands off the keyboard for those few hours. By three, I’m back at it until seven for dinner, then I return for another two hours or so before evening tasks and retiring. Most days of the week when I’m not teaching or meeting with clients, this is the routine.

In winter, little outdoor work requires my attention in the morning, so it is a brisk walk in the cold then the schedule continues.

Until I’m interrupted. Some weeks, I think interruptions are a way of life. The wash machine breaks down. A repair person is called. A leak in the well-made roof suddenly appears. The roofers are called in to fix it. The car breaks down and requires repairs. The truck, the alternative transportation, breaks down before the car is repaired. A friend’s mother is dying and needs comforting – hours of comforting. A friend is leaving town to live in a far away village with the natives for a year and I’m in charge of the going away party. A student requires extra hand-holding and tutoring, and I find myself at the college for hours helping them catch up. The cat gets stuck in one of our 150 ft high trees and requires a tree climber to rescue the poor thing so I can get some sleep after 9 days of meows echoing around the forest.

These are the interruptions of life, tasks that break our habits, our rituals.

They also break our blogging, our creative rhythm.

Many will tell you not to give up your creative space and time, to keep those appointments with yourself to keep yourself on task, focused.

That’s always easier said than done.

I say, let the interruptions be your inspiration, your motivation to work harder and concentrate greater when you take those moments to return to your blog. Interruptions are lessons. They push us to be more than we are, often asking us to be greater and stronger than we think we can be.

Use the energy of the world around you, labeled as interruptions if you will, to give you greater insights into how the world around you works, and how you can share the lessons learned along the way.