The surest sign a new year has started, besides the date changing on my electronics, is the crowded parking lot at Athletic Club Northeast and other gyms across America. Regulars watch with a slight smile as newbies wander around the weight room, pausing to read diagrams on various exercise machines before determining which ones to use. Though many of these newcomers might break their New Year’s resolutions before they can remember to write “2012” on dated paperwork, others’ goals will become habits for the best. I commend the latter group.
Having been in the former group more times than I would have liked, I decided to make my resolution a goal I could see myself keeping, no matter how cluttered my schedule might become this year. Each Sunday, I will blog. I have yet to decide a specific focus for this blog, so I will try different topics this month. Hopefully, I’ll think of some topic about which I could see myself endlessly writing. If not, I’ll continue to search until I find one.
I kept one blog this summer, and another for a class last semester. (I’ve uploaded entries from them to this site, if you’re interested.) Blogging put the “free” in “free-writing” for me. No assigned topic, no rigid format, no word count requirement. Just words that came to mind as I sat in front of my MacBook Pro and thought.
Now, I admit, I’m a bit paranoid when it comes to writing for someone else; the idea must be clear, the grammar pristine. When I write for myself, however, I focus less on the mechanics and more on the expression. How will what I say be interpreted? If I am presenting an argument, have I addressed all the aspects I should? Do I make my message clear? And, above all, I hope readers will enjoy reading my posts as much as I enjoyed writing them.
So, let’s pretend today is the first Sunday of the year (in my defense, it took me longer to create this website than I anticipated) and make this blog a new tradition for the new year. I can’t wait to see what other new traditions 2012 has to offer.