writing.as.amit

I have a fascinating relationship with Mondays. There's some charm to the first day of the week as if it dawns with a responsibility to set things right. With a new zeal not to carry the mistakes from the week gone by.

To follow the routine. To focus on the work. To get back to life.

With responsibility comes pressure. The pressure of all the things undone in the last week and pushed to the next. Pushed out with the hope that the first day of the following week would be different. Better. It never is.

I usually want to get back to all the right habits on Mondays. Why do so on any other day? In the middle of a week? Right? I remember we, friends, once had a running joke where we would answer any suggestion of starting something healthy with “let's start on Monday”.

Gym? Let's start on Monday. Stop eating junk food? Let's start on Monday. Read more? “Let's start ...”

This habit of waiting for Monday to start something different, something good, has stuck with me. Funny how bad habits die hard.

I generally find it easy to write about meta topics around my writing process. Or platforms. Among the people I read online, the behaviour is common. At the same time, I'm not too fond of these meta posts. All I am doing is convincing myself why the choice of a platform is the right one. No one cares about them.

Will I ever run out of places where I can write at? I won't. Can I ever have enough of them? Never. Should I write about all of them? Absolutely not.

Holding oneself back from writing about a particular topic is antithetical to the spirit of blogging, where no topic is beyond the bounds.

But writing about every experiment lends me a false sense of achievement. I write because I want to think better. I write because I want to improve my writing skill. Writing mindlessly about my experiments doesn't help me with either of those. Hence I don't write meta posts any longer.

Or so I think. Ironically, this itself is a meta post.

I came across this brilliant quote from Leslie Lamport — “If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking”. It's simple yet so meaningful.

Writing reinforces my thoughts. It won't be a stretch to say that I understand my thoughts only through #writing. Distil them. Before that, they are just fuzzy noises in my head.

While in school, my teachers would force me to write down what I learned to remember it better. We, students, were made to write chapters multiple times to learn them. But at that time, learning meant remembering things. Not grasping them. I wish someone had told us that writing helped us understand things better. I would have fallen in love with writing a lot earlier.

There's another analogy to Lamport's earlier quote: “If you're thinking about writing, you only think you're writing.”

Though I haven't written much for the past few days, I thought a lot about writing. Every day, I had a new idea to write about. Every day, I gave myself multiple reasons why I shouldn't write about it. Many ended up in drafts. Many had a painful death in my head. It's a terrible place to die for an idea. So I must let them out more often, in whatever ugly shape or form.

I often have such phases when for every inspiration on why I should write, my mind comes up with a hundred distractions about why I shouldn't. The only way I have known not to fall for the lure of distractions is through the routine of fixed time and place for me to write.

If I present myself, the words find a way out. Thinking doesn't do that. Writing does.

It is the phase when I reevaluate my use of all the services I am subscribed to. Of course, my email client is one of the key ones on the list. I was an early Gmail account holder and have been an ardent user since then. But when Gmail got old, I never loved email. It got boring and tiring.

Recently, I realised that I love sending and receiving emails. But I wouldn't say I like Gmail.

iCloud was handling my custom email domain. But as I am not all in on the Apple ecosystem — with my Android and Linux — the experience with iCloud Mail is terrible. In short, I had to find a new solution for my personal and custom email domains.

I started with a trial of Fastmail, and I was unimpressed. No doubt, the email service is brilliant. It's no-nonsense and has everything that an email power user would want. Nothing more and just the way an email service should work. I, however, am not a power user. Nor do I love the experience that the typical email services provide. I needed something different to rekindle my love for email.

That's when I was reminded of HEY. The last time I tried it, I loved the service but didn't need it. Here's what I wrote while ending the trial.

All in all, HEY is a brilliant service with a fresh perspective towards the way we use our emails. It can potentially enliven the email offerings from all the players, just the away Gmail did back in 2004. But I don't face the problem it is trying to solve; I have no use for all its groundbreaking features.

Why do I think I need it now? Well, to be frank. I still don't. But I am falling in love with email again, and HEY's unique take on how email should be done should help me stay en route. So, here's to a new start for emails.

I enjoy my evening walks with Snoopy. This guy continues to get all the attention from folks I have never met. I often hear someone call out his name, run to him, play with him and walk away with a smile. Completely ignoring my presence. As if I don't exist. Such is the charm of cuteness, I believe.

He has also made new friends. He knows where he will find them. He walks to the place and waits for them to come to him. These are the regulars.

There's a corner towards the end of our walk that both of us adore. It's usually quiet. A cold breeze always flows through. It's neither too light to expose us nor too dark to hide us. I make sure we halt there and sit next to each other. Nothing in my hand. Nothing on my mind. Nothingness. A bare moment of a void. Amidst the bustling #life.

And I like to believe Snoopy feels the same. Unperturbed. Many people walk by, but no one disturbs us. Maybe they acknowledge the tranquillity we feel.

Today's walk was no different. And yet was slightly different. After sitting through the quiet moments, I realized it was a full moon in the sky. Pink moon. It looked big, majestic. My hand went to my pocket to pull my smartphone out as it often does. I wanted to take a picture of the magnificence I was looking at. I wanted to capture the moment.

How futile was the thought? The day there exists a technology that can capture such moments of calmness, their significance will dwindle. Such moments are rare; they need to be lived and felt. And in that feeling, in that rarity, lies their essence.

Sometimes, all that matters is to hit that publish button. Do not worry about whether the subject makes sense. Or whether the way it is written does.

Whether there are too many adverbs. Or whether there is too little to say.

When words not published burden my mind, it is worthwhile to make way for them. To make them public. To not let them sit idle as a draft. I won't return to them anyway. After all, writer's block boldens itself in the drafts section.

So to unshackle my mind, I pick some draft and publish it in its form. What's the worse that can happen? It would just be another terrible post in the ocean of terrible posts on the internet.

The good? It would be one post that I publish on the internet. For at least myself to read.

Am I writing enough? Am I writing too much? I cared a lot about these two questions in my early blogging days some 15 years ago. At that time, blog pundits filled the internet with suggestions on the posting schedule or the posts' length. With Twitter and Facebook dominating soon, all those suggestions became futile.

As online presence became a popularity contest, a burst of short meaningless quips became the norm.

Throw more at the wall, and something will stick.

I could never play the social media game. It needed the zeal to always stay connected. I instead felt burdened by the pressure of participating non-stop. No surprise, then, that I kept writing on my blog. A lot less frequently, but I did.

With Twitter and Facebook dropping in popularity, I expect blogging to attract a few new users as an outlet for their voice. And I also expect the pundits to pollute the internet again with their suggestions on the best ways to blog.

Let me spill the beans. There isn't one.

Write anything. Write anytime. Write anywhere.

Don't worry about followers. Don't worry about likes and reposts. There aren't any. Some see this as a limitation — I find it liberating.

I need not fight to make my words stand out because only I write on my blog. Everything I write is always visible.

A day that dawned with many promises ended with a list of letdowns. I wasn't allowed to work on the tasks that I wanted to work on. Other's priorities polluting my calendar – the usual stuff.

To make matters worse, a few people carry an attitude which only mars the team's morale and, eventually, their productivity.

It is one thing to believe you are smart. It is another to assume the others are dumb. The former shows confidence, later callousness.

The only saving grace is that it's the start of the weekend.

What do I call the entries that I write here? Notes? Posts? Thoughts? Or does that even matter? This is my blog, a space, as I noted earlier, for the “quick posts journaling whatever is at the top of my mind”.

I don't call them quick posts because they are less formal. Instead, they are less formal because I want them to be. Because I write them as short, quick posts. They need not be correct. They need not be corrected.

Manu wrote recently about how he dislikes editing old blog content.

[A] personal blog can and should be a representation of who you are at different points in time. We change, we grow and our thoughts and ideas grow and change with us. And it's important to have testament of that.

I, too, am firmly in Manu's camp. If I were to improve my old posts, I would never write anything new. The ideas are shitty, and the way I wrote them is shittier. Nevertheless, I still stand by all of those posts. Sure, I may not endorse any of those views today. But they are the views of my younger self.

The world around me has changed over the years. So has the world within me. It is only natural then that how I look at and understand the world has evolved too.

I recently observed my writing may have gained correctness at the cost of courage. Colin had an interesting thought responding to the post.

I'm not sure about it being a lack of courage, rather an increased reticence stemming from a low-level, underlying fear that now pervades the web.

Is it the fear of being wrong that has made me change what and how I write? Sure, that too. Whatever the reason, I am not the same self I was a few years ago. Why, then, should I ever correct what he thought and wrote? It helps neither the reader nor me.

I couldn't write anything for the last couple of days. Or instead, I feel I haven't written anything for quite a while. But that's not the case. I have written a lot more than I did a few months back. Why do I feel then that I haven't been productive enough?

Is it because I have spent long hours at work and overworked myself empty? Is it because I have wasted a lot of time after work? Or is it both?

I don't feel good when I overwork — it leaves me with no energy to do anything else. It also leads to a need to unwind, forget all the routine stuff and spend time doing nothing meaningful. Watching YouTube. Scrolling through timelines. Sleeping long hours. Or catching up on shows that I wouldn't have watched otherwise.

After the hard, long work, don't I deserve a bit of relaxation? Sure. But at what cost?

I hate the process of getting back to a good routine. I need to work twice as hard on bringing things back to normal. Get the focus back on health – physical and mental. Walk. Exercise. Meditate. Read. Write. Listen to music. Sleep sane hours. Live with family. Live.

My life is balanced on four legs: family, work, hobbies, and health. I am stable if I give them equal attention. If any of these engage me more, my life wobbles for balance. I look for temporary support. Mindless fun lends me momentary respite. But before I know it, I am back to the struggle.

I know I must get my life settled onto the four legs again. Work at work hours. Spend time with family. Lend time to me, to my hobbies. Focus on health.

Do all of these. Just enough to feel in control but not so much to feel overwhelmed. The struggle begins today.