Starting something new is a certain kind of high. There’s an inevitability to taking those first few steps — not only are you likely to achieve your goal, it feels practically certain. The delicious dreams that fill your head, combined with the satisfaction that you, for one, are embarking upon something truly meaningful, is a ride that crests too quickly and crashes too soon. Once that first bottom is reached, any other efforts are rewarded as second-class. The high isn’t the same. The easy parts now complete, the work is harder, and was it really going to work anyways? Inevitability becomes apathy and the project is abandoned.

In some cases, there is no need to even start: the dream of it is enough. Fantasize about something long enough and in enough different ways and the magic is lost. No need to chase a dream when its every potential path has been creatively imagined, determined, and concluded. That is a fast way to churn through ideas, though not a very productive one.

So why start a personal blog? And perhaps more importantly, what makes me think I will stick with it, after thinking about it for so long? Perhaps chief among my reasons, in recent years I’ve done far too much coding and not nearly enough writing, an absence that has been surprisingly keen. I suppose I’ve always taken a satisfaction in crafting a lucid line or an articulate turn of phrase. But what I’ve missed more is the opportunity to crystallize casual comings-and-goings of my brain into coherent and semi-intelligent missives. Each post, if thoughtfully written, should be at once both a tiny manifesto and the means by which I determine what should be declared in that manifesto. Put more simply, and to use somebody’s else’s phrase, how do I know what I think until I see what I say? I feel that if I am to live deliberately, to live deeply, to suck out all the marrow of my life, I must write.

But write what? This is where my personal blog becomes personal. I have long debated separating my cultural, literary, and software engineering thoughts. Certainly online there is a benefit to a more focused stream of content. Yet, that is not who I am nor how I think. The other day I found myself relating Stanley Fish’s theory of interpretive communities to one of my software engineers, and that perfect entanglement of subject matters is representative of how I see the world. It would feel like a violation of self to attempt to put stony walls between these many gardens of mind and spirit.

And so, I cross-pollinate.