Older, but no wiser

I need to start writing again. Need to, because I need to start thinking again, otherwise the already weakened thinking muscles will atrophy still further until they wither away completely. It has become too easy just to drift through the days and years doing little more than reacting to circumstances, rarely taking the initiative, rarely engaging; just becoming sufficiently involved to muddle through the day and survive until the next. Yet the thought just manages to form itself in this treacly consciousness of mine that unless something changes, this is how it’s going to be from here on.

This blog has stood all but abandoned for months now – the current front page contains posts dating back to September. I’ve been unable to find the energy or the will or the purpose to link a few words together. Or a few thoughts. It could really do with a major reworking – the 800 pixel wide layout is an anachronism, the blogroll is out of date – but changes there will have to wait a while. I could start afresh, but for some reason I can’t explain, the continuity of the stream of posts running back to 2003 feels important.

I had no real intention of stopping writing, I just allowed everything else to get in the way. A day, a week, a month, letting circumstance dictate the ways in which mind and hands are employed. That’s a risky road to travel, for it leads away from opportunities for self-examination, away from prospects of growth, towards only a kind of oblivion of the soul. And yet I still can’t escape that puritanical notion that any activity whose beneficiary is the self is by definition selfish and therefore in some way bad. Heads you win, tails I lose.

So I make no promises, either to you or to me. But taking a bit more effort to marshal a few thoughts and set down some words here would seem to be a Good Thing. We’ll see how it pans out.