Things Change

I often think back to those times during high school when blogging was a daily habitual practice for me.  A routine of processing and mind-dumping everything and anything that I thought about.  I've thought, many times, about the differences between now and then, and why I no longer am doing that.  Whether it's "good" or "bad" (of course, neither), this difference.

In one way, it's part of growing up.  Often as we get older, our thoughts feel less novel, to ourselves.  Our brains are incredible at ignoring redundant information -- even to the point where we can develop cognitive blind spots because our mind threw out that information along with a whole bucketload of other things that it deemed to be irrelevant.  Seemingly "grand revelations" about life, or perhaps, the way that we live our own lives, might lose their noteworthiness in the end.

But perhaps a bigger reason is simply having more varied outlets for my thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes you blog or write something in a diary because it feels therapeutic or good to get things off of your chest, or simply to process them by getting them down on proverbial paper, but if you already did that by talking to a close friend, maybe that isn't an unfulfilled need anymore.  It doesn't always have to be an external dialogue either, perhaps you simply managed to reach a fulfilling end to your train of thought in your own head.

Of course, blogging and sharing habits are a personal thing, much like taking and/or sharing photos.  We all have our own different reasons and pursuits, and our practices stem from these.  Sometimes, our practices even stem from habits that no longer "make sense" for us, but still somehow seem to stick around anyways.

If I knew that 5 years from now I would have stopped blogging entirely, what would I think about that?  Would I be disappointed because it would mean that I would have changed?  Or would I be proud that I had discovered so much more in life that this was no longer a practice that I needed for myself?  Perhaps I would simply be surprised.  When you live life under the guise of trying to avoid change, you yourself can take some things for granted...it can feel like a given that some things would just keep going forever, because they've already been going for so long.  That "sense of security" drawn from accumulated past experience is something that I think I tend to lean on so heavily.  That if I managed to keep something the same for this long, then surely I can still keep managing to keep it the same from here on out, too, right?  But maybe that is just "copium", as I think the kids call it nowadays.  Simply another way of convincing ourselves that everything is okay despite our fear of the unknown, of uncertainty, of change, and of loss.