Category: Writing

I spent the last 24 hours (less a few hours of sleep) trying to recover a website with an expired domain for a close family member. I learnt far more about MySQL databases, WordPress installs & domain migrations than I could have doing any course.

The biggest lesson I had is also the simplest: make a list of the steps required, & follow those steps. I had several tabs open, each with a different focus, & I wasn’t meticulously following each step from one instruction (duh!) but reading about it from each of the open tabs. A great recipe for learning how not to do things 😀

All that said, when I finally got the new website to work (a new domain, a bit of spring cleaning on its looks, importing all three thousand posts from the old domain), my unusually loud whoop got the rest of the family a bit worried.

I also got the website to publish posts, selectively, to the users LinkedIn profile. (shout out to the good folks at Northern Beaches Websites for their work with AutoSocial).

All in all, a great way to finish an otherwise gloomy, wet day.

Every one of us has a story we tell ourselves. Sometimes it’s the same one we tell others. Other times, it’s a slightly altered one. Or maybe even a different one. There are times when we even believe the story we tell others. There are some stories we believe ourselves.

Sometimes we don’t like the stories we tell ourselves. We talk to friends, who might help us see the story in a different light. Sometimes we believe them & change. Other times we stop talking to them.
“That girl I really hit it off with at the party won’t talk to me”. “Mate, she gave you her number and asked you to call her. Then you got piss drunk & ….”.
“I never seem to be considered for a promotion, even though my boss knows how much I am willing to take up the opportunity. I think ‘they’ hate me so much as to sabotage every opportunity that comes my way.” “You didn’t even apply for the job.”

Other times, we need professional help.
Sometimes we can afford this help, sometimes not.
In either case, we tell ourselves a story about why it is so.

Some are great story tellers. We listen in rapt attention to their stories. In pubs, restaurants, coffee shops, sometimes even on public transport, you can see this play out every day.  Stop whatever it is you’re doing, take off your headphones & listen to the conversations going on around you. And if you’re alone, go back to the story you were telling yourself. These stories are rich in detail.

We all have friends who bend the truth while they tell their story. We know it because we were there in the situation they are describing, & It’s not exactly how we saw it. “Correcting facts in this moment is not appropriate, everyone’s having a great time” is the story we tell ourselves. Other times we do, & results in an argument, lost friendships, & sometimes tragically loss of life or limb.

There are times when we believe our own stories. We live our entire lives that way. Sometimes we find out the truth. & we are unshackled. Other times, it destroys everything.  See the newspapers for examples. Actually, don’t read the newspapers.

We sometimes write our stories & publish them. We categorise it – fiction, biographies, autobiographies. They’re all versions of the truth.

Job descriptions these days. Regardless of your career, “story-telling is a key skill” is the story that is told around the world. There are thousands of courses that claim to teach us how to story-tell with data.

Ad infinitum.

What’s your story?

I spent nearly all day today setting up a new blog, & moving the ~2000 posts I had on my old blog across to this one.  I wanted to learn how this is done about 5 years ago, & put things off for a bit.

I definitely learnt a bunch of things, especially about how not to do things. I’ve learnt that the two platforms treat “categories” slightly differently, & my categories have changed & morphed over the years to be practically unusable for what I thought I could quite easily do here.

In any case, I hope to continue this exercise of writing for a bit longer, & a lot more consistently.

I’ve been reviewing my writing that isn’t on this blog from over the years, but particularly from the beginning of this year. One thing that stood out for me has been my long standing desire to continue building communities around things I find collectively fascinating.  

I’ve thinking about the narrative for my own life. Like millions before me – and probably everyone right now – I too question the reason for my existence. Is there a divine purpose to life? Or is purpose what I give to life? I’ll write when I find out. But I digress.  

The idea of community has had a profound impact on my life for as long as I can remember. Especially as a young adult, I spent ridiculous hours creating spaces & events for people to get together. For at least five years, I helped organise the Christmas fete at the local church, drawing tens of thousands of people to get together. One particular year, I remember being the only one on the church grounds, desperately trying to get a few last tents set up while everyone else had headed home for Christmas lunch!

For the last two decades, community-based events have been what I’ve turned my attention to unconsciously, especially when work was meaning-less. This year, right in the thick of pandemic-induced separation, I expanded a weekly discussion forum that I help curate at work. It draws ~100-150 people to devote an hour to listening to an interesting speaker talk about their ideas. The feedback from the few people who reached out after these events has been that they’ve looked forward to every one of them, even when the topic of discussion wasn’t directly related to their employment, because it helped them grow their understanding of the world a little bit more.

What’s the point of this all? 

I’m not sure yet, really. But that’s the point of this blog: to write out my thoughts publicly & unashamedly about things, while I look like a pig in mud, grappling with ideas & discovering for myself.

You could  will be forgiven for thinking I’d fallen off the end of the world, given the relative inactivity of the last few months here. 

Millions of words have been written about how 2020 was (it was apparently worse than 2016, which was worse than… you know the drill).  I’m not going to add to that potpourri. 

I’m grateful. Maybe feeling a little bit guilty.

I have ended up at the other end of this year relatively unscathed, job still in hand, food on the table, no need for much of my wardrobe or shoes, commute reduced to <60 seconds. The people I care about & who care about me have stayed healthy, or recovered from the virus.  Many new connections have been formed through the pixels on my screens, while old ones that had not been nourished with the time they need have re-flowered. 

I learnt to solve the Rubik’s cube, thanks to the encouragement of my colleagues, & can solve one in about 120 seconds. I taught what I learnt to a couple of kids over the Christmas holidays – who picked it up in a day!

I’ve re-learnt to write with my non-dominant hand for about a month, focusing on flow & movement over form & aesthetics. 

I learnt to finger-pick a lot more songs this year, and made a few submissions to the open-mic sessions at work. 

I set up a series of talks at work, inviting colleagues to talk about their passions or their areas of expertise, helping build communities bigger than what I could do when I was actually in the office. 

I wrote in my journal very frequently (not daily as I would have wanted) – at least 5 times  a week. I wrote a reflection for my team every week since August . 

My goals this year were to exercise every workday. I joined a gym near work, & even did a public post proclaiming my intent. While the gym membership hasn’t particularly been a good investment, I still managed to walk/jog most days with my wife. With fresh air blowing over the worries on our minds, we returned back home refreshed. The added time we have together has been a blessing to us. 

As the year comes to an end, with an enforced longer-than-usual holiday, I’ve had much time to write, reflect, celebrate Christmas appropriately socially distanced, read & philosophize. I will continue this exercise of rejuvenating the mind & soul, while the body gets disproportionately fed.