When the year started I was busy with a translation project but the blogging challenge of 2011 caught my attention and I loved the idea of participating, but as I mentioned in my previous post I was too timid and too cowardly to go through with it at the time.

My life is now on auto-pilot, a stretch of turbulent free weather ahead, and hopefully it will continue this way.  I have little heat, passion and anger to drive my blogging zeal; my best blogging days were when I moaned and whinged about work, my ex and the assortments of misadventure I seemed to be plagued with. For once though I want to blog for pleasure, for the exercise of writing and putting thoughts to paper. I tried to explain in a previous post my fears and what is blocking this venture, but I am determined to conquer them and going public with this challenge is the best way to “shame” myself into doing this.

A post a day, is a little to ambitious for me, so I am going with the challenge of posting once a week in 2011, I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, and wonderful. Therefore I’m promising to make use of The Daily Post, and the community of other bloggers with similar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments, likes, and goodwill along the way.

Signed,

Robert’s Mother.

I have been away from you dear blog for a long time and it makes me feel terrible. I am beginning to feel an onset of a new condition that I will call blogophobia.

There are many aspects to this fear of blogging in my case. Firstly, as of today I find that I have already skipped many key events of the past year without comment. There are also many half-formed thoughts lurking about as drafts, suspended in their own temporal dimension, as the weight of passing days buries them further away from the here and now. Whenever I start to blog they seem to reproach me at my tardiness, so I just turn my head away from the blog sighing that perhaps it is too much work and effort to dig this far into the past. When I re-read the half-formed thoughts in some of these drafts, I fail even to remember what I was on about, and in this case it is easiest to hit discard draft, but  I still have seven half-finished ones waiting to see the light.

The other aspect of my fear is that I am, as I often find myself in life, straddling some fine dividing line. I do not think I have anything profound to say, yet I find myself too proud, and too old to post just every day drivel. And caught between what I can write and what I aspire to write I just stay silent. My blogophobia gets worse when I read a terrible piece – How awful, I never want to sound like THIS. It deepens again when I read something brilliant – There is no way I can ever write like THAT; it is a vicious, and never-ending circle.

Like anywhere else in life though, it is useless to stay afraid. A day comes when you have to face your fear. So what if I do not have anything important to say? So what if I never come up with a profound thought or never blog a life-changing adventure or experience? There is blessing in being ordinary, and there are pleasures in blogging about toilet-training mishaps or toddler language and logic.

Even in the middle of all this ordinariness there bound to be a light-bulb moment, and a brilliant thought, but if I do not put my fingers to the keyboard to capture mundane moments and thoughts, I will never have the courage to articulate occasional brilliance.

I am hoping this will be the year to get this blog going again. Maybe I will take this blogging challenge for 2011.