The Zen of Blogging

Having blogged now for a little over a month, I have been thinking a lot about what the purpose of this curious endeavor is. When I got interested in blogging I started reading other blogs and was amazed to see that there are people who have been blogging with great regularity for years now. Many blogs are topical - politics or sports or reports on a particular lifestyle (working at and AIDs clinic in Zimbabwe or running a knitwear design business in Paris - the spectrum is mind-boggling). Since Hurricane Katrina I have been fascinated and humbled by a couple of blogs from people still able to live in the area of devastation and keep the world informed of what is going on.

A few years back everyone I knew seemed to be involved in “live journalling”. I tried it for awhile but it was too much like a public 12=Step meeting for me. I’ve been in a few chat rooms and find them basically time consuming. Message boards have been a big part of my life but, if they lack competent monitoring, they can often descend to the level of the basest participants. The internet is a powerful tool and it depresses me to see people using it to air petty grievances about imagined slights.

When I first thought about blogging I got a lot of advice from people in online groups about how to proceed. Blog with regularity, be persistent, blog about what interests you. It is easy to get caught up in the “numbers”. My web host provides good, thorough, and ingenious statistics on who visits my web pages, how long they spend reading them, where they come from, etc. etc. I have been impressed by the increase in visitors to my site the blog has attracted - my page views have more than doubled and sometimes tripled. I am always astonished to read how many visitors I get from other countries. What do I have to say that someone in Argentina wants to read? But they keep coming back...

But the real gift of blogging, I am discovering, is what it does for me. I find now, as I go through my days, that I spend time thinking about what to blog about next and that is very good. Buddhists talk about “mindfulness” - being fully present in the moment and constantly mindful of what you are doing. This is a notion many Americans would prefer to avoid to think about as much as possible. But as I continue to blog I find myself thinking about what I am doing in the course of my day and what, if any, relevance it has to me and, therefore, to the world. It is a good discipline.

It’s too easy to live your life on auto-pilot. We all know what our routine consists of and much of it does not require much thought. But even activities that do not require thought can benefit from attention - mindfulness. Someone once described “love” as “quality of attention” and that has always impressed me. Because when we truly love someone or something it becomes endlessly fascinating. We give it or them a quality of attention that is special and mindful and respectful.

Knowing that I need to blog every day has caused me to look more closely at the activities and thoughts and relationships that fill my days. It is beautiful and satisfying.

This blog has given me gifts - including new friendships, increased business opportunities, and a creative outlet. But more than anything it has helped increase my mindfulness as I go about my life. It has helped me think about how I spend my time, is it productive, and would anyone else want to hear about it.

Thanks for reading.