Persistence
After a 2 month leave of absence, I’ve motivated myself to get back into blogging. Actually lets not call it a leave of absence, it was really a 2 month period of neglect during which I completely forgot that I even had this blog (and that I pay a monthly fee for this domain). This used to be something important to me but over these past couple of months the things that I find important have really changed. More on that later, that’s not the point of this article. What I did want to talk about here is persistence (as you can tell from the title).
This absence from blogging does relate in that it’s a perfect example of what I tend to do with my activities. When I’m enthusiastic about something, I’ll put a lot of effort into it, but as I stop noticing results, the amount of effort that I put in decreases. Usually this ends with me dropping whatever it was I used to be so enthusiastic about. With blogging, last year I put a lot of effort into blogging, but after I kind of ran out of things to write about and after I got busy with starting school again, blogging became less of a priority to me and so I never did it.
My mom has talked to both my brother and I about this. She’s always said that whenever you take up an activity, the beginning is really fun and exciting, and then there’s the really mentally challenging part that just makes you want to quit, but after that the activity becomes really fun because you’re legitimately good at it. She had this talk with my brother about tennis, and with me about clarinet, activities that both of us used to be very serious about (my brother would never admit that he was serious about tennis though) but that we now barely do, or do only recreationally. Having thought about this a decent amount recently, I’m starting to agree with my mom, and that in and of itself has motivated me to get past the challenging part in my activities.
But wanting to do something challenging isn’t a good enough reason to keep at blogging (or anything else). You have to remind yourself of why you started doing that activity in the first place. For me, I started blogging to keep up my writing skills, verbalize my thoughts, and also get some practice with web-page design. Although I’ve lost interest in web-page design, and don’t think I’ll be updating this layout of this blog again, the other two goals are still very important to me and I would like to continue pursuing them. So yes, I will continue to write in here and hopefully people will continue to read what I write.