I was recently introduced to the concept of “”blogging as a spiritual practice.”” Not “”spiritual”” in the sense of either my youthful experience (angels, not thinking too hard about god, veiled right-wing propaganda) or “”celebrity”” spirituality as effectively satirized in the form of David St. Hubbins or Terry & Laurie Bohner on film, but “”spiritual”” in the sense of the act of writing as a tool to organize the mind and assist in making sense of all the seemingly conflicting thoughts always floating around in there. In short, writing as a sort of meditation.

At least that’s what blogging was for the people introducing the topic, who spent a bit of time talking about why they started blogging, and what their goals were for starting blogs. it got me thinking about exactly why I’ve done it for nigh on a decade now, since before “”blog”” was a word. I agree that the meditative and thought-organizing benefits are a big part of why I keep doing it, but it certainly wasn’t always that way. The “”whys”” behind the practice/hobby/habit have changed over the years.

Early on, blogging (or whatever we called it at the time) was, for me, the most subtle and polite way of screaming “”LOOK AT ME!”” I could manage. Very little style or substance. It was pretty much what you’d expect from a bright but insecure young adult with free time and access to the appropriate tools. I’m not saying that many worthy things haven’t come into existence out of exactly that combination of factors, but it’s probably a good thing most of my output from this period is lost to the ages.

Later, I conceived a “”blog”” as a way to share the mundanity of life with others geographically distant (to see examples, refer to the early years of ancient history, linked above). Lots of alarmingly specific* posts consisting largely of “”I did this, then I did this.”” this got boring to me, though, as evidenced by the sometimes weeks-long spans between posts. The folks who I was trying to share with didn’t do much sharing back, and the dreams of conversation (witness the aborted attempt to set up a message board in summer ’06) kind of died.

By that point, though, it was a habit, so I kept doing it. Eventually, I started branching out into more idea-based writing (this largely coincided with the end of graduate school – I guess I had some free headspace), particularly once I got deeply (for me, anyway) involved in the 2004 Presidential campaign. I started writing less about my activity schedule and more about my thoughts on things happening in the world. Slowly but surely, I think I started finding a voice; or probably more accurately, I stopped being ashamed of my voice, and no longer worried that the things my voice wanted to say would put certain people off. As a result, I think the writing got better, and I became a bit more comfortable in my own skin.

What I write about today varies a bit. there’s still some description of “”I did this,”” but I try to limit it to interesting and novel things. This has the benefit of generating a motivation to overcome my hermit reflex and seek out interesting things to do, and thus write about.** A lot of what I write today, though, is reflective; a lot of prose dedicated to discovering who I am as a person, most often through the lens of how my past experience has shaped me. Some of this manifests as nostalgia, some as regret, some as vague references to intensely personal dirty laundry, some is just music, pop culture and cat pictures, but almost all of it simply trying to draw a line between who I was in my teens and my twenties and the person I find myself today.

What I’ve found interesting and surprisingly helpful as this blogging experiment goes on is that I actually have a representative example of my thoughts and feelings over the course of a decade or so; a decade that I’ll almost certainly look back on as one of the most transformative times of my life. This has helped me to chart my evolution a little more effectively, to see more clearly the trends and causes of why I ended up as I am at this point in my journey.

Because, as science tells us, memory is fallible, making us all unreliable narrators of our own personal stories. By the nature of how our brains work, we build faulty data into memories as time goes on; our perspective is inherently compromised. It’s just how the human brain works – memories are fluid, and changeable through time and experience. What this means is that your memories of a given event in the past are different today than they would have been earlier. Having a marker back there (in the form, of say, a blog post) is often useful in getting to a consensus perspective between the two perceptions.

And sometimes, it’s just useful to have a record that can tell me definitively when exactly I went somewhere or did something. You’d be surprised how often I use that.

In any case, having arrived at this point by examining the chronology of my blog experience, I suppose I owe the reader the promised mission statement (I’ve already covered the “”meandering”” part):

I guess I continue to write in this space, because the act of writing through my thoughts, feelings, and ideas helps to make sense of and find truth and meaning in them. In that sense, I guess it is mediation, which a quick google search defines as “”a spiritual practice…to explore the very nature of what we are.”” It’s self-reflection, an attempt to understand why I hold a thought or belief. Sometimes the best tool to facilitate that understanding is to open up a text editor and start writing.

But that’s not the whole story. The writing is one thing, the other part of the blog ethos is publishing. For me, the act of putting it all out there sets up a sense of obligation and motivation. Mentioning something on the blog can push you to follow through on it. If I talk about biking in this space, I’m more likely to do it. I keep a little mileage counter over on the left sidebar; the pressure to keep that ticking up regularly is a motivation tool. That motivation helped me lose 30 pounds over the last year. A couple of years ago, I started keeping a running list of the books I’ve read as part of the blog. As a result, I read a lot more. The act of publishing one’s intentions helps one to follow through; it’s really that simple.

So that’s that…perhaps the most meta blog post about blogging that was ever blogged. I hope it was worth it.

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* – So alarmingly specific that a couple of years ago, I went back and scrubbed many of the specific proper nouns out of the archives (to protect both the innocent and guilty). That’s the only editing I’ve done, though. the rest is as it was at the time, misspellings and dead links and all.

** – As a result, I’ve managed to do some pretty interesting things over the years, including the crashing of election night victory parties, meeting and talking with several people whose work I truly admire, and seeing some really talented artists and performers at work. I probably wouldn’t have done any of these things had I not had the pressure to come up with something interesting to blog about.