On the spur of the moment yesterday I decided to join many of the peeps in the blogosphere at the 21.5.800 challenge, 21 days (huh, I thought it was a month. Bonus!) combining yoga and writing. To be honest, the yoga is not really the issue for me since I practice at least 5 days a week anyway (and teach!), but I thought it would be a nice opportunity to re-connect with my writing. Also, I have 10 days of lovely holiday time coming up, so what better way to use them than spending some time every day curled up with that lovely journal I got a while ago...
I used to write a lot... ok, you might say obsessively. Journaling to be precise. Recording the intimate and inane details of my daily existence, page after page, book after book. Private thoughts, social thoughts, and totally random thoughts, beginning when I was about 12 ("Today in class the teacher said..."), taking me through my teenage years (which I recall were mostly devoted to trying to figure out how boys minds' worked... big waste of time that one... ;) ), and into University (filling secretive notebooks with dreadfully important existential ramblings and social rants). Blogging has been a nice way to take that compulsive self-expression to a higher level - writing for an audience, albeit a virtual one, is a very different animal, and one I'm enjoying thoroughly. Cause you all really don't care what I had for breakfast (banana-cinnamon smoothie) and tomorrow, neither will I. Blogging has been a way to focus my thoughts and my words on issues that I feel may actually be of interest to other people, and connect with you all through those ideas.
However my personal writing has really dropped off in the last 5 years or so (funny how that happens when you start working and you spend your free time enjoying yourself instead of procrastinating!) so I'm taking this challenge as an opportunity to re-connect a bit with that. Which means that I will not be posting my writings as a daily blog entry, although the occasional bit might slip into my blogging! I have to say from my experience yesterday the first thing I noticed was "darn, I am out of practice handwriting"! Maybe a month of journaling will fix those cramped hands and scratchy scrawls. I know that holding a pen used to be a source of joy to me!
I think most of us are here in the blogosphere because we love to write and read. So tell me, what is your relationship with the written word?