A return to blogging
after a brief hiatus (time is all about perspective – one man's brief is another's lifetime… Please, no puns on undergarments and changing time to line)
is never easy. Primarily because it means returning to creativity in one of its
most meaningful forms and that is something I find daunting. Not because I feel
I could never do it, but because I'm afraid I cannot any longer. The creative
part of my work life is limited to fancy boxes and charts on PowerPoint presentations.
Poetic license is shunned, and rightly so, in favor of economy of speech and
brevity of disclosure. I prefer this to jargons being bandied about, mainly
because I don't get most of the them as they make no sense and the ones that I
do understand are not relevant in the contexts they are used. It may be that school
is not cool, but trying to be cool with "buzzwords" (say that with a
French accent, it's infinitely funnier) is not the way to go either.
However, and by a
curious coincidence, a recent exercise at work required me to flex the thus far
hidden creative section of the grey matter, and it suffices to say that I
totally stunk up the place. By virtue of being almost PowerPoint exclusive, my
ability to be brief reached such new levels of efficiency that I was more adept
at using 10 words to describe an event that could equally be described in 20
words. Now, this may be confusing, but I challenge you, especially those who
spend their lives paraphrasing and summarizing, to engage in the exact
opposite. Things that were second nature to you in high school suddenly become
not so second nature – my description of the sky on a typical, non-Middle
Eastern summer's day, would be "Blue, with no cloud cover". In high
school, I would be encouraged to write "A clear, cloudless sky of light
blue punctuated with the chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves".
Brevity deems that birds and trees do not explain the sky, but it also dictates
that the description could be of any bloody day in the year that wasn't cloudy.
So I return to
blogging in the vain attempt to reconnect with a past that allowed me to write
with a semblance of creativity, certainly better than "Blue, with no cloud
cover", all the while ensuring that I refrain from work related rants and
exposés. The latter is easy – I think I enjoy my job sufficiently to rant in
speech rather than the written word; the former, not so. However, just because
it is not easy, let it not be an obstacle to the endeavor – I shall try my best
to prove, that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, punctuated with
thousand-word pictures along the way (See what I did there – I replaced jargons
with idioms <<insert cool look>>).
In the effort to
return back to what it was, the blogging experience should be about moving
forward, both in context and content. It is in the shower, the birthplace of
all great and good ideas, where I've come to realize that I may have spent a
significant portion of my "me-time" over the past five years looking
back. I've re-read a significant number of books and re-watched a significant
number of TV shows that I had already re-read and re-watched a significant
number of times before. Having a personal and digital library (both books and
video) has benefits, but they should come with a disclaimer. If you do not add
to either, you may be left poorer for the experience. And add I shall, slowly
at first and more to the books section rather than the video. I've not always
been a fan of TV and it takes a good show, such as the newly commenced
Newsroom with Jeff Daniel (who continues to surprise
me), to really draw me to it. I hope that it remains this way. However, I hope
not to return to things or experiences that are cozy to me, but make a
significant move to embracing new experiences and perhaps enjoying more things
in life than I've done so in the recent past.
It may be that I
blog in fits and spurts, it may be that I blog regularly. I do not know, but in
this case, the good thing about me not knowing is that no one else is left at
the edge of a cliff. I've not written in years, so I do not think anyone has
missed it. However, if you have, I sincerely thank you for your patience – I
perhaps do not deserve it, but more importantly, a simple thank you may never
be enough to show my gratitude.
New readers,
welcome; old hands, welcome back. And if nobody reads this, I shall stoically
console myself with an old Chinese saying: "If a tree falls in the forest
and no one is around to hear it, has it really fallen?"
I usually embed
lyrics in my posts – lyrics that hold meaning to me and are relevant to the
topic. I cannot lay claim to the creation of the lines below; that belongs to
Mr. Frank Sinatra
"Blue skies, smilin' at me
Nothin' but blues skies do I see
Bluebirds singing a song
Nothin' but bluebirds all day long
Never saw the sun shinin' so bright
Never saw things goin' so right
Noticin' the days hurrying by
When you're in love, my how they fly"
Clearly, he had a better professional life than I did...
Onwards and upwards,
as they say…
