I guess it’s now a good time to resume my regular blogging activities, once again, don’t you think? After all, it’s been over three months since I last created a blog entry over here and I suppose I am very much overdue on it. Perhaps even more so to share across an explanation of where have I been in the last three months and venture into sharing some additional details on why I have gone through the longest blogging hiatus that I can remember over the last 10 years that I have been blogging along myself. Was it needed? Yes, you bet it was! Why? Well, two words to define it that I can think of, so far, to explain such a quiet period: (re)focus and purpose.
Over the course of the last 3 months there have been several attempts where I drafted a blog post I just kept writing, and re-writing, over and over again, and I eventually gave up on it. It just wasn’t right. Don’t worry, it wasn’t the well known writer’s block that got me stuck. On the contrary. All along, I wanted it to go out and be published. I even came up with a title for it to describe a bit what I have been going through in the last few months: “Scalability and the Power of Letting Things Go“. Then it hit me: it just wasn’t going to be worth it. Well, maybe it was, if only perhaps because of its cathartic power, but then again it just didn’t feel like it would eventually make it. And now, three months later, upon looking back, I’m glad it didn’t. Because, all along, I was just so wrong with it.
It was one of those blog posts where I was angry and rather upset about a good number of different things. Where my own internal rage almost unleashed itself into the unknown. Rather emotional and perhaps even somewhat visceral, if you would want to call it that way. Pretty damaging overall, if it would have gone out eventually. Even more so when plenty of my closed networks strongly discouraged me to publish it, because they thought it just wasn’t me. It was someone else taking over. Someone that I know I wouldn’t have been able to control myself once it went out. You see? That’s what empowering, trustworthy, caring and nurturing networks can do to you, when you least expected, after you have decided to go the extra mile and trust them dearly as if they were an integral part of you: they protect you to death even against your own self.
And I am grateful for that. They all know it. You ALL know it. I am thankful that I listened to each and everyone of them looking into things from their perspective versus just my own selfish and self-destructive one. Yes, self-destruction is what that blog post would have meant eventually. Of everything that I may have built over the course of the last 17 years in this rather fragile digital world. Of everything that I have strongly believed all along on what I have been meant to do with that digital footprint. And then it hit me. All of a sudden, this article I published nearly 2 years ago, under the heading “Reflections from 2011 – Focused and Purposeful Social Networking“, came to my mind as a flashback to remind me of something I may have lost along the way in the last 18 months or so: (re)focus and purpose.
Indeed, upon reflecting through that long period of three months of very rare and scarce external social interactions from yours truly, I realised that all along I seem to have gone off track from my original purpose. It’s been an interesting experience, because it’s helped me evaluate how I would want to re-focus and re-find that purpose and aim back at the original source of the meaning of the things that I do in the world of Social / Open Business. In fact, I think what I have just gone through, perhaps without even realising about it all along (And that’s a good thing, I guess!), is letting serendipity do its magic, once more, and help my purpose re-find me again.
And it looks like it’s succeeded on its own, because I am now, finally, back! Full of that same energy, and passion, all intact as if it were yesterday, 14 years ago, when I first got started with social networking, and with a renewed source of purposeful meaning into wanting to change the world. At least, my world. That’s gotta be a good start, don’t you think? Well, the excitement is there and as I am starting to wrap up 2013, while currently enjoying a few days of holidays, 2014 is starting to look as exciting, nerve-wrecking, mind-blowing, uncertain, chaotic, complex, beautiful and, above all, more networked than ever before!
Quite an unprecedented learning experience overall, I might add…
Isn’t blogging such a wonderful thing? You bet it is! Once again, it’s managed to bring me back from that darker side of things in all things digital that was just taking me nowhere. Oh, my dear blog, how much I have missed thee throughout all of this time!
