“It feels weird not to publish my thoughts.”
A sentence I never thought I would say, but something I said as I was on the return drive from Washington to Kansas the other day. I was talking to my friend Jed. He and I have both, over the last couple of years, talked about the power of writing. For the purpose of professional growth, but also the impact writing has in our own lives and the effect it can have on others’.
A couple weeks ago I decided that I would take a couple week break from publishing on my blog. Not because I was done writing or even because I thought publishing wasn’t useful. Honestly, it was logistics. I was going to be out backpacking a fair bit of the two weeks, so I wouldn’t have service some days to publish. I also thought it might be wise to try taking a break.
Though I decided I wouldn’t post on my blog, I did commit to writing every day while on the trip. I did something similar on my last biggest trip to the west coast two years ago and it was something I’m really grateful to be able to look back on now.
I’ve written every day now for over 600 days. A few times that those writings don’t get published on my blog, so as I’ve said before, the streak that comes from this for me is not as much about the publishing, it’s the writing. The publishing is honestly just a way to keep myself accountable to write every day. And I’ll admit, while on the trip, since I wasn’t posting every day, it was so much easier to try and convince myself not to write, but I was able to persevere. Sometimes writing one sentence, sometimes writing fairly long stories of the day.
To get back to what I was talking about with Jed in the car, I was realizing that over the last week and a half, I had been writing narrative pieces. Ones that were centered around what we did, not what I was learning. As I was talking to him, I realized that I hadn’t had an outlet to express some of my thoughts and ideas recently because all of what I was writing was factual around the trip. I wanted a place to express my own thoughts on different matters.
I’m ready to get back into it.
The writing that I wrote over the last two weeks is mostly all in my notebook, so hopefully in the next few months I’ll transfer them and then get them up here on the blog, but for now, I’m going to keep going where I’m at.