You Should Write A Blog

What? Me Writing a Blog?

Okay, first I had to go to Google and type “What is a blog?” in the search slot. I discovered there are lots of different kinds of blogs. There’s your travel blog and your food blog and your DIY craft blog and your music, business, health, parenting, business, sports, religion, political, and personal blogs. Before deciding what kind of blog I wanted to write, I needed to think hard about why I wanted to write a blog in the first place. What did I want to say, and why should anyone care to read it? Here’s what came to mind.

I’ve been around for eighty-three years. I’ve been a lot of places, done a lot of things, met a lot of people, had a wide variety of experiences. A lot of the things I’ve done have been interesting; some of them have been funny, a few sad or scary. From most of them, I have learned something. Yes, there have been a lot of lessons along the way, and I’d like to pass those along. Writing a blog would seem a good way to do that.

Another reason for going this route is that I’ve spent more than a year writing a book. It’s called Keep Your Eye on the Ball—and Other Clichés to Live By. Into that book, I have poured a lot of my experience, but not all of it. There were dozens of incidents and anecdotes—and clichés—I could not seem to squeeze into those chapters, and I’m looking for another avenue for expressing them. Also, the exercise of putting a book together has been stimulating and thought-provoking. I have notebooks full of possibilities, scraps of paper on which I’ve jotted down ideas that might be turned into something. Why not turn them into a blog?

So. My kind of blog would be composed of personal, journal-type entries about random topics that came to mind as I wrote that book about clichés and discovered unexpected meaning in oft-quoted, well-worn maxims. I have traveled all my life, so I’m sure a lot of what I write will include adventures I’ve had out there in the world, experiencing different cultures. “Much of who we are is where we have been.” I have shelves of travel journals I haven’t read for years. It will be fun to have a look at them and see if I can find connections between where I’ve been and who I’ve turned out to be.   

I consider myself a theater person, and much of what I have learned about life I have learned as an actor, a director, and a spectator. There’s a chapter in my book called “The Show Must Go On.” But what about “All the World’s a Stage” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business?” Or maybe “Act as If”

I spent much of my career as a teacher of interpersonal communication, and that is still a topic that I find fascinating—and important. “Say it like it is” is worth writing about.  Or maybe “Reading between the lines.”

I love to cook; I’m interested in staying fit and healthy. Think of all the old aphorisms I could look into. “You are what you eat.” “Man does not live by bread alone.” “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” “Easy as pie.”  

At this stage of my life, I look at things more closely than I once did. Seeing, really seeing is something that interests me. One of the chapters in my book is titled “Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder.” There’s more to say about that. “What You See Is What You Get” is a cliché I’d like to “unpack,” as they say. (“Unpack” is rapidly becoming a cliché, itself.) There are quotations about seeing that deserve a blog or two. Henry David Thoreau said, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Or it would be fun to “examine” this quotation by that wise old sage, Yogi Berra; “You can observe a lot just by watching.” No, there’s no shortage of subjects to write about, clichés to look into, sayings and quotations to investigate for meaning that lies beneath their surfaces.

In recent years, I have become acutely aware of the fact that I have more past than future, and I want to make this “Fifth Act” as rich and meaningful as possible. Maybe I can come up with some things to say that will help other people do the same—no matter which “act” they are currently playing out.