January 02, 2011

The Death of the Public Journal

It has been half a decade since I last posted New Year's resolutions, and by and large, my track record with accomplishing the resolutions I have mentally set for myself since then has been just as dismal as my performance in writing for this most forlorn of sites in the past few years. As I was thinking of what I wanted to accomplish this year, however, I could not help but recognize how useful the practice of writing down resolutions was, and for two independent reasons. The first (and most obvious) is that writing down the resolutions provides a means of referring back, and measuring success (or, in my case, failure) on a year-to-date and year-on-year basis. The second, however, is what I find to be more interesting: being able to look back years after the fact and see what I was thinking at a very different time in my life. The latter gets to a point I made some years ago: I only wish that I could have had the foresight to have begun writing earlier . . . ; it is an immensely powerful feeling to read what you have written so many years before, feeding not only wistful nostalgia, but an undeniable sense of accomplishment and maturity.

Having established that writing down things is necessarily a good thing doesn't, however, say much about the medium in which it is written. And in many ways, the conundrum I face today is that I am looking to find personal significance through blog posts I had composed at other times in my life, knowing full well the manner in which those posts were composed. Put otherwise, what I am looking for is a journal, and what I have is a blog. There is a distinction between the two, and for this particular enterprise, it makes all the difference in the world.