perspective & the future of this blog

I often have to step away from myself to really see my life. I get so caught up in the daily ins and outs that I sometimes forget how blessed I am.

I forget to be grateful.
I forget to be mindful.
I forget to enjoy.

And I find that the most reliable way for me to see my life from a different angle is often to literally see it from a different angle. So I walk to the corner of the garden or the bottom of the lane as the sun is dropping behind the hills and I breathe it in.

And look back at my family moving in the windows, getting ready for bed, and realize that our house is so bursting with love that nothing else matters.

I started poasting on twitter because I wanted to remind myself of what was important to me. And to force myself to enjoy these little moment of zen every once in a while. To force myself to see my life from a different perspective.

I had seen some interview with Seth Godin about how and why he's written on his blog every day for the past 7500+ days (yeah, do the math, it's nuts).

What Seth said was that he simply liked doing it because every day he had to find something to write about, which focused his mind on the things that were worthy or felt important to him. And writing about them made them loom larger in his consciousness, which improved his focus on those things.

It's a virtuous cycle of attention.

I started poasting on twitter because I wanted to remember the small little beautiful things my kids said and did. Because I wanted to remind myself of the little victories - when we made pickles or birdhouses. When I was a good father and a good husband.

Because I'm hard as fuck on myself, frankly, and I needed a way to remind myself that I'm doing okay. That my kids are okay. That I'm doing right by them. And to remind myself how important they are to me.

Because I find there's often more clarity from the outside looking in than looking at yourself from where you sit.

So that's why I'm doing this at all.

When Twitter first started its downward spiral i started this website and gathered a bunch of email addresses of people who wanted to know if I wrote something. But I found myself wondering whether this or that was really something they wanted in their inbox.

I realized I was interested in producing two very different kinds of work:

1. Polished long-form work with a lot of effort behind it. For example I'm working on an essay about how we think about screentime when it comes to our children.
2. Completely unpolished writing that goes from my mind to my fingers to the page as a conversation with the world. Something every day. Who knows what that means.

I wanted to write both, but didn't want the two to turn away people who only wanted the other kind of work.

So there are now two subscription options (both free - I have no intention of ever monetizing) - one for each kind of writing.

If you only want the polished high-signal stuff, you can do that.
If you only want the kind of stuff I would put on twitter, you can do that.
If you want both, you can do that too.

I think that's quite enough self-important proverbial throat-clearing now, so until tomorrow.