Legacy MattersWhat a writer the Doctor is
How many gifts do we have, buried under a hardened armor, awaiting the gracious trauma of a shattered shell?
I've written a lot about business blogging and how businesses are changing everything. What I haven't written enough about is how blogging is the way we are recording our experiences and our thoughts here and now for ourselves but also in a form that will last for generations yet to come. What journals and letters were to the pioneers, blogs are to those who are colonizing cyberspace and marking their journeys.
Blogging is the way we find out what we think, what we value, who we are.
The Doctor writes about his year blogging .
I have always been a man of few words, preferring the quick quip to the thoughtful response–the right words always coming hours or days after the exchange. But writing: aahhh, there is a way to express your heart, to pour out your soul. The beauty of words, sometimes carefully chosen, sometimes flowing effortlessly from a source unseen, pounding out their rhythm and cadence, sometimes soft, sometimes stirring. Like music, they penetrate the spirit with power, deep speaking to deep.
I have learned to love great writers, and love to learn from them, in my own stumbling steps to imitate and emulate. And the web! Who could have imagined that a medium so poorly suited to reading–reading a book on computer an unimaginable chore–could prove so ideal for the comment, the essay, the quiet reflection, the fiery retort? Fascinating to see this medium evolve in ways never imagined–fascinating even more so to watch society, culture, country, and world change as a result. It is not the medium which transforms the world, but the voices of those rarely heard before.
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I am grateful to have this vehicle for catharsis, to formulate and organize thoughts otherwise scattered and incomplete.
Some time ago, I posted about Dr. Bob's remarkable essay, Dancing with Death, but then lost track of him. I happily rediscovered Dr. Bob after reading Gerard Vanderleun's post on Let Us Know Praise Remarkable Bloggers.
Rediscovery is what you will find yourself doing if you keep a blog.
You'll rediscover what you thought last year and, in time, your family will rediscover a lot more about you.
If you don't want to publish your thoughts for the whole word, consider a family blog that's password-protected or a private blog just for you. The process of writing what you think, feel and believe, what you've seen, done and experienced will force you to be more reflective. You'll think more deeply about what really matters and that will be a gift to you, to your family and to the future.
Richard Lawrence Cohen writes
Blogging is the best training in awareness of evanescence. I work on every post with as much sincerity as I would put into the same number of words in a novel. And there it goes.
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I have my archive, though. That’s my last resistance. I rarely enter my archive, but if it were lost I’d be heartbroken.
My hope is that one of my biological descendants will discover it and be inspired. It will help him or her do something really good, something that will really last. This great–grandchild will look back and send me a message of thanks.
Or there will be scholars who study the blogging phenomenon of the early twenty–first century. They may not even be human -- they may be artificial intelligences. Somehow they will hit upon my archive and include it among their sources, helping them learn what life here was like. So while I will never be widely known, I will always be known to about six readers.
This is my hope of resurrection
Posted by Jill Fallon at June 27, 2005 2:14 PM | Permalink