I have many thoughts on my mind, and sometimes they immobilize me. So I should start by writing them down.

1: I’d like to have a summary of my life. A detailed memoir or autobiography is a rather ambitious undertaking, so I’ll leave that for later. A daily log is a rather tedious affair. The magic middle is months. Assuming a life expectancy of 80 years, that’s 12 x 80, or 960 months. Nobody really remembers very much about the first 10 years anyway, and I don’t know very much about the 10 years that followed- so if I break my life down month by month, that’s about 700-800 months. If each month were represented by a page-long summary, that wouldn’t be an overly intimidating read. With a little compression we could bring things down int 400 pages. The commitment is one page a month. Not too shabby.

Why the summary, though? Primarily a matter of coerced introspection. To simply drift along with the wind, to allow the self to give in completely to whim and fancy has proven to be undesirable for me. I know full well that the opposite extreme is equally undesirable- life shouldn’t be lived with a stopwatch and obsessive analysis- that kind of gets in the way of living. But there’s a balance to be had- a little bit of reflection goes a long way.

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October has been a little rough for me, and entirely on the inside. It’s the first time I’ve felt this much self-doubt in a long time. No, I don’t have anybody to blame but myself, and yes, I know what I need to do to correct it- and I have been correcting it. My own inertia is to blame. Unenlightened living. Failure to focus on the important things. Excessive self-belief. I put way too much trust and confidence in myself- “Visa will deliver”, I think, and so I allow myself to be distracted, to waste time, so on and so forth. I am thoroughly convinced that discipline is more of a matter of habit, self-awareness, measurement, observation and self-defined environment than it is sheer force of will. It’s what I do with myself that counts, and where I put myself.

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2: I’m getting older. I’m not complaining, I do like being where I am. But I am growingly aware of the fact that I am no longer “one of the young ones”. I’m not a child anymore, I’m not a teenager. I’m still weak, I’m still ignorant, I’m still confused, and I have begun to wrap my head around the idea that I always will be.

There is some frustration, though. What permanent- or relatively semi-permanent change have I created? I know now that I cannot change the world, I can only change myself, and hope that it matters enough to make a difference to others. I’ve been taking cold showers every morning these days. I need to go back to the days when I used to read books every day like a junkie. I need to get my most important work done the first thing I do each day.

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3: I wrote a blog post for Poached about why YOU should start a blog. Or well, really, why my girlfriend should start a blog, because she totally should. Anyway, the point is- while trying to communicate something I understood implicitly, I learnt something else. (Wow, I am disgusted with my standard of writing in this post- my brain’s not working and the words are not flowing. This is what my writing looks like in a first-draft sort of format.)

Anyway, what I wanted to share from that was- I started writing about what it was like when I first started my own website, and I started getting into my childhood state of mind- why did I have a website at all? Because I wanted to. I took a lot of pride in creating an experience for visitors- I didn’t really create my own content, I mainly tried to aggregate content that I liked, in as elegant a way as I managed to. Linked to games and jokes and displayed them as cleanly and efficiently as I can.

In a strange way, I was better able to focus on the user experience then than now. I wasn’t particularly enlightened- I simply created the page that I wanted to visit. Somehow, in trying to impress people, or in trying to not-give-a-fuck, I overlooked that basic principle- that you have to create what you want to see created.

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Want to get fit. Been working out a little bit everyday. Progress is good. Going to bed now.