“Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.” ~ Paulo Coelho
Way back in 2003, when I first put this website up, I didn’t have any notion of how long it might last, but I certainly didn’t envision the year 2020 and a personal website’s endurance for such a stretch. That said, I’m happy to have had such an outlet. Artistic and creative expression is worth years of therapy – really good, intense, helpful therapy – and I will always find a way to express my artistic ambitions. Yet to the observant visitor, my posts have generally been on autopilot of the past few months, perhaps years, and my heart may not be in it as much as it once was. It began a few years ago when I took my first summer off from daily blogging and it was so wonderful. Reconnecting to daily life and living each moment as it came without thought of documentation or blogging about it reminded me of what we should be doing. Ever since then, it feels like we’ve moved into the fall, and now winter, of this site’s grand trajectory. It puts me in the mind of this music – ‘The Malady of Elegance’ by Goldmund. Do give it a long listen.
Winter is good, no matter how much of a bad rap it gets, and I’m as guilty as others have been in condemning it. Its stark harshness, its unrelenting viciousness – it all has a purpose. Yet as much as I know how necessary it is for the true enjoyment and health of a proper spring and summer, I still dread and recoil at the horror of its frigid days, its icy winds, its way with chilling the heart. But there is beauty in the cold, a beautiful crystalline truth and clarity that only comes when you strip away the leaves and foliage and flowers and examine the bare bones and structure of the world. It’s frightening, and I can admit that I’m a little scared, but it’s absolutely necessary, and ultimately it will prove beneficial.
And so we enter the wilderness of winter for this website. I’m not sure how it will all pan out, whether it will simply fade slowly away with diminishing posts, whether it will go out with some big glorious bang, or whether I’ll simply disappear without a word, vanishing into one of the hidden corners of the anonymous world wide web. I’ve been pondering my own mortality of late, wondering what might happen if I suddenly got hit by a car, my life instantly and unexpectedly snuffed out by some freak accident or tragedy. This blog would sputter out a few more pre-populated and then posthumous posts, a ghostly trick of our technological world. Those who only knew me here might think I was still alive, still writing and creating, when I would have already gone.
Such pondering of my own life found a focus in the past week when I was stricken with the flu, missing a couple of work days, a therapy session, and limiting the usual three-posts-per-day schedule this blog has managed to maintain. It put all those things into perspective, most especially the latter, and it suddenly dawned on me that the only person putting pressure on myself to do three a day, to maintain this pace and volume, was me. As I get older, and hopefully wiser, I am learning to let go of such perfectionist goals. I’m also learning to look ahead to the eventual end of this website as we know it. As far as personal blogs go, or websites in general for that matter, this one is a dinosaur, and I say that and own it with pride. Name your favorite blog right now and I bet I have it beat. This site is older than Twitter and FaceBook and Instagram. Think about that for a moment.
At 44 years of age, I’m way older than those social media sites as well, and some would, not inaccurately perhaps, proclaim that I’m too old to be doing a blog, and that blogs are all but over anyway, and that’s a fair take on the whole scene. The idea of a blog has likely passed its highest point of potency. There are too many easier outlets to make a creative name and channel for oneself. I’ve also grown a little too comfortable with the format and limits of this site, and any time the hint of stagnation rears its still head, I get a little restless and look for a new challenge. At this point in our technological history, that new challenge may be a return to a mainly off-line existence, an unplugged life not lived for documentation or recaps. Where not everything must be noted or annotated for future reference. When I think of the freedom involved in that, I get a little giddy. I almost want to slip away without word of warning or notice, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary night, never to return again, never to explain or say goodbye. Yes, that appeals to me as someone who has always preferred an Irish goodbye.
I don’t intend to go out in such a way, if I do in fact even have a say in it, so I’m hopeful I’ll get to design my own exit strategy, and we have a few more months or years to figure that out. It’s good to have a little preparation though, a plan of how this journey might go. The best thing about winter is that it is the springboard for spring, for the next rebirth. We will honor that in the snowy world. We will honor that in our slumber. We will rest and prepare for the next igniting of the phoenix.
