Somewhere between the freezer aisle at Whole Foods {where I couldn't stop tweeting} and today, a whole surge of things I want to talk to you about have popped into my mind.
You see here a couple of things I've been experimenting with. Well wait ~ first let me preface this post with this: Whenever I travel now, especially in the past year, I get to meet so many awesome new people. Why? Well because of this blog, twitter, my etsy shop, e-courses I teach, and generally this entire online community I've been building and getting to know people in over the last four years. This is such a cool by-product of this online world that I eluded to in my first after Squam post ~ that I also could not have anticipated when I started this whole 'blogging business' in July of 2006. It's a by-product I love, and honestly one of the reasons I feel so inspired to not only travel, but live other places, so I can really spend time with these incredible people I am coming to know.
I digress. When I meet people who are connected to me through the online world that we share let's just say that many of our conversations over tea, wine, coffee, insert your beverage of choice, almost always include lengthy discussions about this very online world, specifically blogging. These kinds of discussions always get me thinking.
As a regular blogger, I'm sure many of you can relate, it's common place to evaluate, at least once a year maybe more? why it is exactly that you keep a blog?
And now with more blogs than ever to choose from, I often wonder what keeps people coming back to mine. Then I wonder if that is my intention to create a blog for my readers or for me or for both? And then you see how the cycle goes?! Each one of these questions is in itself a blog post, so I'm going to come back to my initial point of this post and that is this: I'm experimenting with allowing creativity to feel inspired not forced and that goes especially for the writing of blog posts, tweets and facebook status updates. And you know what I've found so far, sometimes it means that there will be nothing. There will be silence and sometimes there may be times when there's so much to say that I can barely squeeze it all into one post let alone two or three.
I think when you're an online business, you feel somewhat obligated to always be "there". And in some ways this is true. And in some ways I think this also inspires forced content rather than organic content. Organic content, hmmm, how's that for a new buzz word? I do feel that the world is moving so fast, and information and content moving twice as fast that if I step out for a bit, I might be forgotten. On a personal level that's mostly ok, but as a business owner the thought that you might be forgotten in a second can feel a bit scary.
So reflecting upon this further, I don't know for sure that this is true. Maybe you can help me sort this out? I tend to remember the people I want to remember, but I know hearing from them helps me remember that I want to remember them? Does that make sense? And sometimes people can be present every so often, but what they have to say is so meaningful that I never forget about them and sometimes people have a lot to say that it is equally as profound. I guess what I'm coming around to is, that saying, you know the one, "to thine own self be true". No more obligation here to what you think your voice, or level and type of communication, is supposed to look like either online or in person.
I find myself saying this a lot these days, "It's an interesting time we live in" A time where we are all just beginning to learn how we want to maneuver in this new world of communicating and keeping in touch.
And another reason I wanted to address this today is because of the Armchair Parisian's recent comment on my post about choosing to be quiet where she said "Isn't it interesting how "responsible" we feel to explain ourselves when we're quiet for a time...?" and she's right. It's that obligation thing again. If we do choose to be quiet why do we feel the need to explain it? In fact why do we in general as a society feel the need to explain so much of what we decide to do? Sometimes I know for myself, the explanation is really about expansion, about exploring new ideas and ways of being ~ like I'm doing in this post. I know that other times I'm just letting people know where I'm at so they don't worry. Much of the time it's because I don't want to be misunderstood or misperceived. And that's the part I'm trying to let go of. At some point I just want to trust myself enough to maneuver in this world exactly as I am, quiet or chatty, knowing that when I'm clear that's all that matters.
To sum up what I'm trying to say here. Going forward I want to create, writing or other wise, communicate and connect when I feel inspired to. Sometimes it's a simple factor of time, only being able to accomplish so much in a 24 hour day, but all the other time's it needs to be about inspiration. I also want to try and fit the writing and creating of blog posts into an hour or less. If it's over that, it's either too long a post or I've over thought it, which I often do. I don't know exactly how that's all going to look, but I guess we'll see. And if anyone forgets about me when I get quiet, I'm ok with that too.
