When I moved to Pune some six months ago, I found myself walking along a path for too long only to realise that it didn’t lead me wherever I was going. I was still getting used to the whole area. It was unfamiliar, and therefore, sometimes, I had to retrace my steps back to a juncture before I could move in what seemed to be the right direction.
I ran into a similar situation when I refactored this blog and with it my writing style. I walked in a direction for about eight and a half months, only to realise that it was, in fact, the wrong way.
Back in September, overcome with an abundance of time, and a zeal of creative flow inspired by heartbreak, I decided to stop writing anything but my thoughts. It wasn’t unfounded as well for the self-help articles were abundant but not as helpful, at least in my head. It was a long time coming, and so, I took the plunge into dividing the blog into two parts.
I called them the Journal and the Words.
I pushed myself into a corner after I began walking further from that juncture. For at least a couple of months now, I’ve stood facing a dead end questioning the path instead of the choice I made at that juncture, and it seems only recently I realised where I went wrong.
Before we try and discuss this critical mistake at hand, let us look at the one thing I was awful at during the entirety of my schooling—writing essays.
A major contributor of that was because I wasn’t a good writer, and I still believe I’ve only gotten a wee bit better, but a less equal yet essential contributor was the fact that the topic or prompt was pre-decided.
I’ve always been bad at writing or thinking when confined to a prompt.
So, when I gave myself restrictions, I unknowingly did exactly what had prevented me from landing more than some hundred words on a piece of paper during school.
Alas, it only took me around two hundred and fifty days to realise it wasn’t the best idea.
I believe that even if blogs die as a medium (pun intended), there’s still a lot to share. I think there’s still a lot to talk about beyond casual journals and metaphors about past relationships.
I’ve barely written anything I have wanted to write about between said juncture and today. I think that is because nothing was either as casual or straightforward to talk about in a journal without a title or as complicated to dress up in a metaphor.
Besides, I believe that the right metaphor comes to you, and if it doesn’t, there’s no metaphor.
I remember this blog, in the little presence it could garner some years ago, for having something for everyone. They were the glory days, sometime between ’16 and ’18.
I posted articles and pieces on all sorts of topics, and to help other people if they ever so needed it. I rambled about my life and days just for the sake of it.
I’d like that to return to that point again, but without destroying the present. It’s just like walking down the wrong road; you do discover a cafe you visit intentionally sometime later. So, it’s not all wasted perhaps.
That said, in the spirit of the theme that the blog is currently on, let’s go with another category, bringing back the self-help articles, and slowly moving towards casual pieces by bringing titles into the journals.
So, the Polymath will have three parts now—The Journal, The Words, and The Nudge.
The Journal will tell you how I feel and what has happened. The Words will still be rare, waiting to take the highlight at some point in my life. The Nudge will be exactly like the old Helping Hand, just less proud and self-righteous.
I think it is crucial to lose our way, only to retrace back, and choose another path. The subtitle for The Polymath is still learning through experience and error.
“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”
Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland
P.S. The Nudge will have a post every Wednesday, on schedule, just like the old days.