Why blog?

So, why blog?

These past days have been different to the norm. Dad passed away recently, and this has unleashed periods of incredible calm and reflection.

This period has also been a catalyst for me to get stuff down in more permanent form, and saved for posterity.

• Songs (well lyrics at this stage, with recordings to come)
• A very rough and ready attempt at a memoir (taking inspiration from my Gran, who, when I was very young, wrote a short history of her life for me before she passed)
• A few scattered pen and pencil attempts at poetry

Revisiting some of these past creative outputs and unlocking early memories has only augmented the reflective process brought about through Dad's passing. Whilst I'm perfectly comfortable with sitting and thinking (an underrated way to spend time), I do sometimes find it beneficial to externalise thoughts, from which they can then be internalised. This method can help to make sense of them, to order them, or just to have given them expression and made them more tangible.

My usual method of externalising is to pick up a guitar, or sit at the piano and flow (or stutter) into musical creation - indeed, I have started to write a piano piece which gives form to some emotions that I've been feeling In the days since Dad passed. Sometimes poems work to the same effect. For me, these methods are a perpetual process of refinement and thus not suited to what I'm looking for now, which is for something to be written down once and left.

The aim of this blog is different, it is not to 'craft' something, it is not to capture a transient feeling and set it down in a single piece, and constantly refine it until I'm happy with the structure.

I wanted to examine and embrace the ephemeral nature of emotions and expressions during this period, and write in a more formless flow, largely, though not exclusively, uninhibited by rules or refinement.

It is certainly something I wish Dad had done, as there was much of his earlier life which I know well in terms of the 'facts' of what happened, but I have no sense of what he was 'feeling'.

So, that's why I blog today.

The next posts may not be about my experiences or about myself. They certainly won't always be so contemplative. But they will be my thoughts. And having these in a blog is a useful way to acknowledge them, and potentially a useful way to revisit different periods of my life.