Taking Blogging Seriously

It’s a warm summer night in NYC and I’m walking through central park with a friend, the fireflies blink around us like an external reflection of the neurons firing in our brains as the conversation sparks.

We talk about meditation, our life’s goals and wants. And blogging, of course.

I’ve always been an advocate for blogging. It’s rare for a conversation with my friends to not at some point touch on blogging. It’s a running joke at this point.

But it’s no joke. You should take blogging seriously. I am.

After some soul searching it’s clear to me, finally, why blogging is so important to me. It’s not because of the internet, or even because of writing. It’s because it’s a vehicle for creative expression.

There’s something deeper here - too much of adulting is designed to stamp out individual creative expression. And when we do finally carve out the time for some creative projects the world encourages us to keep it to ourselves. To journal in our bedroom, to paint in our basement, to hide away from others. Who taught us that creative joy should be a secret?

I call BS.

Blogging is deeply important to me because it’s a powerful mixture of two ideas: creative expression and finding the others.

It’s about helping you become more of who you specifically want to be, so that you can find deep and meaningful connections with others.

As Henrik beautifully put it, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people:

You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.

Realizing why blogging is important to me personally I realize why it pains me to see Erin making art and not sharing it on Instagram. I realize why I love riffs and small b blogging. I realize why we started an artist collective to get artists more visibility. I realize why I love self publishing so much. I realize why I wrote my book in public as I went along.

Creative expression that finds the others.

Blogging isn’t writing, it’s a way of seeing the world with fresh eyes

Of course blogging isn’t just writing. It’s a way of seeing the world with fresh eyes. Blogging is a mindset.

More people should write by James Somers:

You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live. I’m thinking about a book I read called Field Notes on Science & Nature, a collection of essays by scientists about their notes. It’s hard to imagine a more tedious concept — a book of essays about notes? — but in execution it was wonderful. What it teaches you, over and over again, is that the difference between you and a zoologist or you and a botanist is that the botanist, when she looks at a flower, has a question in mind. She’s trying to generate questions. For her the flower is the locus of many mental threads, some nascent, some spanning her career. Her field notebook is not some convenient way to store lifeless data to be presented in lifeless papers so that other scientists can replicate some dull experiment; it’s the site of a collision between a mind and a world.

I think this points at a fundamental way to get started with any kind of creative expression - look at your fish. To pay attention is to be creative.

From the academic paper Curiosity made the cat more creative: Specific curiosity as a driver of creativity:

Specific curiosity drives individuals to engage in greater idea linking, and through this focused yet exploratory process, individuals who are experiencing specific curiosity tend to generate ideas that are more creative than those of individuals who are not experiencing specific curiosity.

So…

What’s better than being ordinary? Being weird. What’s better than being weird? Being weird with friends.

I’ve met so many wonderful, magical, life-long friends on the internet. Long may that continue.