The Blog Rounds, Season 2 (TBR-S2): Why I blog

“Why” is a most powerful question. Through these three letters, the mind is jolted into a state of introspection that unearths reasons, validates or debunks long held assumptions and beliefs. It fortifies decisions or gnaws at them until the core is revealed and exposed and made vulnerable.

This blog has been roused from a prolonged state of stupor by this question from a fellow physician and blogger: Why do I blog. Not the most unique or earth-shattering of questions; but given my context, it could very well be one.

My relationship with this blog has arguably been the longest I’ve maintained. I think we’ve been doing fine, until recently, when the realities of life, including work, procrastination, and distractions like Twitter and Facebook, have taken me away from blogging.

I really miss blogging. These are the top 10 reasons why I still endeavor to write:

1. This blog is a piece of cyberspace that is entirely mine, where I can be alone and yet remain linked to others. In a planet with close to seven billion people, that is a challenge- personal space.

2. Writing unleashes a torrent of thoughts that the mind just has to unleash, else I’d go mad.

3. Blogging and this blog have allowed me to share things I am passionate about, from national
advocacies to personal pursuits, under one roof. I would like to think that this is my attempt to maintain a one-stop shop for those who’d like to make the world and themselves better than before.

4. This blog has served as my life’s time stamp and online picture frame, capturing and displaying snapshots of daily events and once in a lifetime triumphs. It’s a record of what has happened, events that may ultimately be forgotten if they were not written about. Experiences when not written down have not been experienced at all; life written down is experienced twice.

5. A venue to be mundane and an avenue to be profound, this blog is.

6. Of course the online joust and cyber-tussles, virtual kudos and emoticon-laden words in the comments section are source of both stress and fodder for the ego.

7. Other modalities for sharing, such as Twitter and Facebook, while stripped of the often cumbersome trappings of blogging, can often be actually stifling and restricting, the challenge being how best to say things with limited characters to a wider audience.

8. I often make a tiny, tidy sum, from all this writing. You might want to explore, too, yourself, and go Adgitize =]

9. Bad as this will sound but I have to admit that blogging is a reason to procrastinate.

10. While one picture may already say a thousand words, just one word evokes a million other images. Imagine how powerful, then, one blog entry can be.

So there they are, the reasons why I blog, or at least attempt to continue doing so. I believe this particular blog entry could very well be one of those many re-starts to this blog, that sudden spike in the heart monitor which sparks the hope within the family members of a dying patient, that hint of the sun in the horizon in the aftermath of a tornado, that rest area sign where comfort can be had by those needing to pee or poo for the last 100 miles, that faint sound of sirens from police backup just when the villain is about to finish off the protagonist in the movie, that crescendo of music signaling the reunion of two star-crossed lovers after all the pain and suffering they had to endure to just be together…

In simpler terms, with this blog post, I’m back, I guess, I hope. Uh-oh.