A Fool and his Words are Soon Parted

My Blogging Absence August 1, 2009

An open letter to my friends, near and far, who keep up with me by reading this blog:

As anyone who’s read this blog regularly has long since noticed, I took an unplanned hiatus from blogging during the last 5 months. This wasn’t so much of an intentional thing as it was a matter of me not feeling particularly inspired to write.

Some of this, I’m sure, had to do with a diffusion of my attention while I’d been engaged in a job search. (I eventually stopped searching for full-time work, and started an independent IT consulting company.)

Some of this is probably attributable to Facebook, and its tendency to draw you into engagement, even over trivial status updates (which is another form of micro-blogging, similar to Twitter tweets.) Some of my friends have suggested that there are other reasons.

One friend suggested that I’ve got some “unresolved anger” issues. This is probably true, but when I’ve stopped and considered the things that truly make me angry or frustrated, I can’t honestly say that they would have stopped me from venting here, or in some other forum. Instead, my anger and frustration seems to be with myself, and struggling with not having a strong enough sense of accomplishment in my life in the past few months.

Another friend insists that I’m just too busy, and allow too many things to creep into my life. There’s probably a bit of truth to this, but if I look back on my life, it’s hard to find a time when this wasn’t an observation shared by one or more friends.

However, lately I’ve felt refocused, for a variety of reasons. This past week, a particularly painful loss gave me time to reflect on a number of things, with the end result being renewed energy toward productivity, and toward people (as opposed to things).

I surely don’t know the number of days I have, nor the number of days to share with friends and loved ones. Some of those days will be cut short by death, and others, by choice.

What I do know is that I can consciously choose to invest myself in the ones who choose to be part of my life, which will enrich everyone in the process. To that end, this blog is a way for me to codify some of the many things I may not get a chance to share with you one-on-one, though that would be my preference if we both had enough hours in the day.

Who (not what) are you investing in, and why?