"Be a Doer Not a Dreamer:" A Blog Renewed.

I'm reviving this blog.

I've decided I want to spend more of my time writing, as a daily practice; but I hadn't figured out how to share parts of that writing yet. Do I just post longer captions on Instagram? Do I try and write a book (what would THAT even be about?)? Do I go back to ye ol' blog form from the Days of Yore and see how that goes?

My answer is yes, to all of them, in some way, shape, or form.
(I am not naturally a minimalist, guys.)

I love the challenge of distilling my thoughts into an Instagram caption. Sometimes I want the staying power, searchability, and deep-dive exploration of a topic that a blog and its posts/articles/essays offer. And someday I'll write a book...even if no one reads it and it's just to say that I did.

I naturally lean to the 'more is more' side of the street, my internal bike handlebars are bent that way, and I frequently get overwhelmed with how much I have instantly required of myself whenever I take on a new project BEFORE I have even started. I get worried about where my imagination has taken this tiny idea; my overwhelm then kills my ideas dead before I've even begun to act on them. My head is a super fun place sometimes, murdering ideas by squashing them flat with all the sparkles and decorations I make them wear to prove themselves worthy of acting on.

I've been reading Shonda Rimes' book "Year of Yes" recently. In it she shares her commencement address she gave at Dartmouth University titled "Dreams are for Losers" where she tells all those fresh new graduates to "be doers, not dreamers." She makes the case that it's the doing that gets you places; you just start doing whatever you can until you can do something else that is better and builds on what you've already done. I am not a student at Dartmouth, but she's speaking to me anways.

"Be a doer, not a dreamer."

I've decided that needs to be my new theme. I have no problem dreaming; I've dreamed up whole lifetimes that I've lived based on my wild ideas without ever doing anything about it. And there's a place for dreaming, definitely. But it's the getting started, the DOING part that keeps tripping me up.

So in order to help motivate my writing practice, I am keeping what I choose to share on this blog simple and sometimes without photos (gasp!) because I need to just DO the thing, imperfectly and in a bare-minimum way for now...not focus on all the ways I can dress it up and make it bigger and better and more just yet.

So please excuse the simplicity. Doing is being done around here.