In my home, there’s a “blogging season” as my husband calls it. For the last few years, I’ve been blogging during the 40 days of Lent. I’d tell a story and include a prayer and workout at the end of each post. It was rewarding. It was hard. It was what Lent should feel like.
At the beginning of 2020, I started blogging every day because life seemed to be moving faster and since I still haven’t located a PAUSE button, I knew I’d better share my story. Ralph Waldo Emerson said,
“A man is what he thinks about all day.”
I think about writing and the sunny feeling I get when I help others or touch their lives. (With three kids going to college soon, perhaps I should think a bit more about tuition money).
Let’s just say I’m like a Border Collie with a constant head tilt completely engrossed in 50- shades of everything, and the nuances of nothing. I think of stories constantly. Not in an Emerson “Self-Reliance” kind of way, more in a Seinfeld “show about nothing” kind of way.
I am always thinking about how all of us are linked and how sharing our stories helps us celebrate our milestones or hold each other up in our toughest moments.
Maybe it’s commiserating on how tricky it can be to shuttle three kids to three different practices starting at the same time.
Or maybe it’s about trying to help your children with homework as you pretend to remember what ‘slope-intercept’ or ‘rhetorical writing’ means.
Or maybe it’s listening to your own 80-something parents on speakerphone as they recount their day going from church to the doctor and then the grocery store, all the while wishing you were there to drive them, hover over them and hold their hands for balance and warmth.
Perhaps it’s a middle school story about our kids being too shy, too needy, too weird.
Or maybe like me, it’s when you hear the news about a mom you worked with for years on PTA who died in her sleep and how she was too young and won’t get to see her children graduate.
Blogging reminds me of writing my fears and favorites in my childhood diary. It had a green satin cover and that little tiny key I hid and lost, and used a bobby pin instead. Writing to me is a chronicle, proof, opinion, and vulnerability…the more I do it, the easier it is.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Outliers, he claims the way to achieve world-class mastery in any skill is to repeatedly doing something correctly for 10,000 hours. It’s this deliberate practice that leads to expertise.
runonmom.com 