If I Started Blogging Today

In a couple of weeks I’ll celebrate my fifth blogiversary and is my custom I start celebrating well in advance of the day. Typically I try to use these sorts of posts as a moment during which I reminisce about the past, speak of the present and consider the future.

This has been one hell of an experience and I find it inconceivable to imagine my life without the blog. I was never one for journaling. If you search through the boxes in my garage you won’t find notebooks filled with my hopes and dreams. I didn’t like it, journaling that is and I didn’t do it. The few exceptions being those school assignments in which I was forced to keep one.

But this has been a tremendous experience that has brought me much joy and pleasure as well as some real aggravation. Inside these cyberwalls lie the hopes, dreams and aspirations of a relatively ordinary man.

If you really know me then you know that some of those posts are raw emotion. I have my moments of doubt and times in which I wonder if I am destined to be a tortured soul who is unable to rest. But there are also a lot of good moments that have been chronicled here.

Believe it or not, I am someone who easily shares my thoughts and feelings. Oh, the superficial stuff is easy. Not afraid to discuss politics or religion and tell you what I think. I can do all that easily.

It is the deeper stuff that is hard for me. Anonymity made that easy. I could say anything and not worry about it. Slowly over time that anonymity has been compromised. Some of it is/was my own doing and some was not.

But I think that if I had to start over that there are two things that I can say I would do differently. I would have come up with a better name. I am a creative guy and could easily have come up with something better than random thoughts.

The other thing that I would have done is said the hell with the anonymity. I would have used my real name and solved or avoided a number of problems. At least that is what I think I would have done.

It is not so easy to say. Who I am at 40 is a bit different than who I was at 35. The past five years has been filled with an awful lot of challenging situations. It is fair to say that in some ways it has been the most challenging period of my life.

Death came to visit. I lost two grandparents and said goodbye to the parents of some friends. My father had a major heart attack and almost died. For a while he and my mother were forced to live across the country and I became responsible for taking care of three grandparents, another household and more.

The dark haired beauty came into my life and turned things upside down. My career underwent a few changes. Friends got married. Friends got divorced. I was in a car accident in which my car was totaled. I was lucky to walk away with a few bruises.

All of that is a partial list of some of the things that happened. Compared to some it was nothing and compared to others it was the most incredible upheaval they’d ever see.

In short we call it life.

I do my best to try and live a life without regrets, but I have a few. There is a very significant one that weighs upon me. I won’t say more than that. But I’ll admit to wondering if I made a mistake by not taking that fork in the road.

On the other hand I can’t help but wonder if there is a major benefit in having not taken that path. Did I gain some valuable life experience that I can apply to my life. Not to mention that it is very possible and quite likely that the path I didn’t take will intersect again in the not so distant future.

Since I can’t actually see the future all I can do is try to influence it so that the outcome favors me. I suspect that in five years I’ll be able to come back to the blog and take a look at this and get a sense of whether I hit the mark.

Oh, one more thing about starting over, at least as it pertains to blogging. If I started blogging today I’d probably make this a niche blog that focused on a couple of topics and I wouldn’t post more than once or twice a day.

Oh who am I kidding, it is May and I already have written more than 400 posts this year.