No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.

Buddha

Almost four years ago I had A Nightmare.

And like so many doodads in doom boxes scattered around my apartment this blog became one of so many projects that I’ve started and, just as quickly, stopped. Without ever really getting going.

Reading back over it now I know what four years ago me was saying — and most of it still rings true. I still think of my brain as my RAM and my phone as my hard drive. I still have calendars and to-dos. I still have a system. But that system is almost entirely different. For one thing, I’m no longer even using Omnifocus — the app that was to be the centerpiece of all the posts I had planned!

I am thinking about all the other times I false started at blogging, dating all the way back to my Dead Journal days. In high school I probably tried every LiveJournal clone there was. One year in college I started a New York Jets blog and gave my uninformed, never-played-football-in-my-life opinion on how they were doing (they went 4-12 that year and committed their own fair share of false starts). Even on this domain I’m pretty sure I’ve reinstalled WordPress more than once in order to completely wipe the failed remnants of a false start blog. Every time I would start with a lot of gusto and every time there’d be the inevitable 6-8 month post gap, followed by an apology post with a promise that “This time it will be different.”

Many times, that was the last post to ever land on that incarnation of the blog.

This time, I hit the post gap in record time. There is only one other half finished post (in drafts) which if I’m being honest I’m not even going to read. I’m sure there are some things in there that might still be true today, and might even make for a good post, but everything is so different for me now than it was then. I’ve got a new job (its cute what four-years-ago me thought was a lot of projects at work). I use a whole different set of tools. I have different philosophies about how I keep and store my thoughts. I’ve learned to work with my ADD rather than against it. I’ve learned that I have ADD in the first place (and as usual, I was the last to know).

So this time around I’m not going to make any promises to be better. I honestly have no idea if I’ll be better. Maybe I’ll post fairly regularly. Maybe this is the last you’ll hear from me for another four years. All I know is that when you commit a false start, you have to go back to the beginning, line up, and try again.