Starting A New Chain

On July 8th after being really sporadic with blog posts, I wrote this post declaring that I was getting back on the wagon and I was committing to writing blog posts every day for… ever.

I made it for thirteen days in a row.

Then I took a little detour for two days.

Then I got back on track and wrote two posts in a row.

Then I took another one day detour.

Then I got back on track. For one day.

And then I took a five day detour.

This is the way life goes.

Sometimes you string a whole bunch of good days together.

And then sometimes you hit a little bump in the road.

Sometimes you have a pretty big hurdle to get over.

This happens to all of us.

It’s no different than taking a road trip.

If you are driving across country, you have a destination you want to get to.

When you take a wrong turn, you have a couple options.

As soon as you realize you are going the wrong way you can turn around and get going in the right direction.

You can choose to just keep going in the wrong direction for a while knowing you are really increasing the time it’s gonna take you to get to your destination.

Or you can say, Fuck it. I didn’t do this perfectly. Screw the trip. I’m just going home.

I took a five day detour and I knew with each passing day that it was going to make getting back in the saddle a little bit harder.

But I’m back at it.

There is a story about Jerry Seinfeld where he was talking about how he became so successful with his stand up comedy.

He said every day he’d work on his routine and write new material and then put a big red X on his calendar that day.

And his goal was to string as many red x’s together and to never break the chain.

It turns out that story isn’t actually true.

But it is a great way to gain momentum at anything.

The more links of a chain you can string together, the better.

So I made it to thirteen links on the chain and then the chain broke.

I could throw in the towel.

Or I can start making a new chain.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

Today is Day 1. Again.

Plus I talked to my mom this morning and she said she’s getting tired of seeing the post of me very NOT gracefully swinging on the rope swing at Paugusset State Forest and also that she worries about me when I haven’t written a post in a while.

So here you go Mom.