Limits

My first blog post in over half a year. Not the longest gap between posts, but I definitely feel like I’m moving further and further away from writing regularly, and I think this is because I’ve found my limit of plates I can spin at once.

I opened git bash this morning, and I couldn’t even remember the command to run this blog locally. Two years ago, I was writing draft posts pretty much weekly, and this year, I didn’t even think about writing my annual New Years goals. I recognise that a big part of this is the nature of my work (which I talked about a bit in my Priorities post a while back), which takes up a lot more of my ‘daily thinking’ than my previous job, but it is also that other things now take up my daily- and weekly-routine.

And what ‘things’ are these? Running is still the main one I think; at least, it is the activity that takes up most of my time. I also started to learn German a year ago, so that’s a daily lesson plus a once-a-week night class. Dungeons and Dragons is a full two nights a week now that I have a second group, and as I’m DM for one of them there’s also a lot of preparation I need to do. Charlie actually takes up less time than he used to now that he is a fully-grown adult dog and not a whiny teenager, although since he has a little sister now it’s about a wash in terms of using up my time.

So, what could I have written about that I haven’t? I had to break my running streak earlier this year on the advice of my doctor as I’d developed sepsis. Oh aye, that’s a good example. I didn’t even think about writing about it. I’ve babbled about some mindless, inane topics on this blog, but neglected to mention the ‘could-have-died’ part (don’t worry, a course of antibiotics cleared it up). I also still haven’t written about Canicross, despite Charlie and I running 11 races together this year (and one short-course with Sid). I’ve run two marathons and three half-marathons since my last race report in 2017, and not a single post about them. Since my last travel post, also in 2017, I’ve visited Vienna twice, Gothenburg, Los Angeles, and at least three new UK cities that I’d never been to. And again, no posts. I’ve moved house, built a whole new side of my life, without so much as a word to mark it.

This sounds a lot like a lament, and in a way I think it is. Danny and I were talking recently (oh yeah, Danny, my partner of 18 months with whom I now live, and this is her first mention in my blog) about our combined lack of a social media presence, dog-instagrams excepted. This is semi-deliberate on my part, as I don’t feel the need (and I don’t want to feel the need) to seek validation via social media channels, but also because this blog was supposed to be my outlet, the controlled window into what I was up to. But now that I don’t keep it updated, I feel somewhat lacking. I like reading old posts, both on here and on social media - I guess it is my generation’s digging-through-photo-albums - but if I’m not creating them, then there’s nothing to look back on.

So, in the absence of my New Year goals, I am setting myself one target, which is to write one new post per month. I may not post it, but I want to have one new entry either here, or in my drafts folder each month. It’s not that I have nothing to write about, I’ve just reached the limit of ‘routine activities’ that I can maintain without half-arsing them. But, I want to at least try to see if I can squeeze in one more.