Up The Hill Backwards
Record I'm Listening To: The Doors - The Doors
Beer I'm Enjoying: Gipps St Pale Ale - Stomping Ground Brewery
Progress is typically non-linear. My seven-month old was a wonderful sleeper between the ages of two and three and a half months. Now, as he's getting a little bit older, his ability to remain asleep throughout the night has been subordinated to his ongoing growth and development. He's teething, learning to roll over, kick his legs, and he's got a smile and a laugh that absolutely melts our hearts. Yet, all this change is impacting his ability to sleep. It's easy at two in the morning to lose my marbles and question why he's regressed so much, but in reality what I perceive on the outside as going backwards, is actually a bi-product of tremendous growth on the inside. Or, perhaps my wife and I simply allowed him to get into bad habits that we're now struggling to break him out of. I don't know. Regardless, I like to think that a regression in one space need not necessarily be seen negatively when it's correlated with progression somewhere else. After all, I don't doubt that my son will eventually sleep all the way through the night again, and he'll have that giant, sweet smile.
This is the first post of my third attempt at sharing thoughts online in a blog. I never lost interest in the activity after I first started. My journal writing has remained as prolific as it was in 2016 when I purchased my first one and put pen to paper. But I found writing for an audience, albeit a very small audience, challenging. There's a lot of self-doubt that comes with sharing something beyond the confines of a private journal and I tried to protect myself against it by creating a series of constraints within which I expected to have enough freedom to work with. The opposite occurred and I was constrained by the constraints. On a more superficial level though, I didn't want my website hosted on WordPress, I wanted something much simpler, but I didn't know how to host it myself. When I started teaching myself how (with the help of this incredible guide from Derek Sivers), I got very excited about moving everything from WordPress to my own self-hosted website. I ventured down this rabbit hole while I was on parental leave from work after my son was born and was simultaneously in the process of starting my PhD. I enjoyed the process of becoming more familiar with different operating systems and hosting my own email and private storage so I can eventually say goodbye to Gmail, iCloud, Onedrive and goodness knows what else. But in doing so, despite carefully laying out all the aesthetics for my new site and converting all my previous WordPress blog posts into html syntax, I never actually wrote anything new before going back to work. Then my wife and I packed up in North Carolina and moved back to Melbourne with a three-month old so I could pursue my PhD full time. Suffice it to say, it's been a bit busy since getting back and I just haven't had the time. However, the urge to start fresh began to nag in the back of my mind. But the perfectionist in me still wasn't happy with a handful of components about my self-hosted site and so just as I was about to start fiddling with the minutia of the infrastructure and convince myself I was being productive, when I would really have just been procrastinating, I found Bear. That is really to say, Derek Sivers recommended Bear. The rest, I hope this time, will be history.
David Bowie wrote Up The Hill Backwards to reflect the struggles of facing a crisis. Procrastinating on a creative project is not a crisis. At least, not in my case. But much like my son who refuses to sleep now, but is growing in other ways, I've felt like maintaining a blog has been like walking backwards up a hill. Since my son was born, I just needed time away from my laptop (my personal laptop anyway) to focus on other things in my life that required an elevation in priority. But because I never stopped writing completely, I was able to reflect on what I enjoyed about maintaining a blog and what I didn't. Science, by its nature, also involves a staggering amount of writing (with rigorous feedback and reviews) and so I've continued to practice and improve. Now, as I nestle into a comfortable new hosting platform, I'm excited for what's to come and what I'll be able to bring from my previous attempts. After all this is, first and foremost, simply supposed to be a fun hobby and a way of staying in touch.