10kLAKES dot com

Today is National Poetry Day.  Take a moment today and give yourself the gift of a poem.

I share one of my favorites by Robert Frost.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

rain through my window

crystal drops pitter-patter

on the windowsill

Lunch at Matt’s today with my friend Shannon. Snapped some pictures on the old iPhone.

So here I sit on a cold and rainy October evening (the first October evening of the year, in fact) pondering the future of this little personal blog I began, oh so long ago. I’ve been noticeably silent on these pages, with the exception of the automated Twitter Digests that are generated once a week. I had so many plans for this blog, yet many of the ideas I had never came to fruition. Be it laziness, be it struggling with how to continue, I don’t know. Possibly a combination of both, with a dash of a hundred other things tossed in for flavor. Any way you look at it, they would all be excuses for my being inattentive, because I certainly haven’t been incapable.

This blog was meant to be an expression of my life: the journey, and what I’m learning along the way, as well as a record of where I’ve been and knowledge I’ve gained. I’ve struggled with the second part of that statement, as the novel I’m writing tends to focus heavily on that aspect of my life and I didn’t want to duplicate my work there, or toss everything out into blog posts instead of sharing it via the novel, which I feel is a better vehicle for discussing those aspects of my life. As for what I’m currently learning, many of those things don’t become clear immediately. It takes time for our experiences to teach us the lessons we’ll gain from them, so it grew difficult to write about ‘the now’ in the way I initially intended.

So here I sit, on that cold, rainy October evening, debating how to continue. But while debating may seem like progress, it is not. It is stalling. I must simply forge forward and let it become what it becomes on its own.

Much like Life.

So as this new month begins, so does my renewed dedication to this blog. And to my life. I can’t try to plan out where it will go, exactly, and I certainly can’t guess where it will go, but you, dear reader, will be along with me, again, in the passenger seat.

“Nothing like a chair shortage to spark a nationwide squatting trend. That is exactly what happened in 1959 when a bunch of University of Arkansas fraternity brothers decided to make their chair-lacking displeasure known by “hunkerin‘” all over campus. The funny looking practice spread throughout Southern colleges and then eventually throughout the entire country.”

Source: A Continuous Lean