There are two ways for me to look at this last year of blogging: it has been either a complete success or a total failure. How I choose to look at it could be an illustration of that classic conundrum: is the glass half empty or is it half full?

Or, is it neither of those things?

Perspective really is everything, so let’s look at it first from the glass half-full side of things. I DID NOT get as much accomplished with my writing as I had hoped in this past year since I started my (second) blog. Because the blog was supposed to be my side-thingy, my practice space, my other writing project.

This is the assessment of someone who writes admittedly unrealistic to-do, to-read, to-write, to-learn, to-visit, to-cook, to-go, to-knock-out-of-the park lists. When I compose such lists, I have endless resources in my estimation: all the time, ambition and money necessary. And then reality hits that ALL of those things are finite: I HAVE TO CHOOSE how to use WHAT I’VE GOT. Half a glass is plenty to get me where I need to go. It can get me to the bathroom, if that’s where I want to go, eventually.

To flip things, my half-full glass was a lot. A year ago, I was trying to figure out what kind of blog I wanted to write, what the heck were widgets and plugins (in blog-speak) and how to get over the fear of just putting my words out there into the blogosphere (a.k.a blogophobia.) Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out those things.

And then, there’s the simple fact that for the last year, at least once a week, I posted something to this blog. When I hear about the discipline of someone like Seth Godin who posts every single day, I’m humbled in my efforts. Sure, his daily posts are super short but any kind of regular writing simply requires: 1. ideas of any calibre; 2. actually writing the ideas and; 3. coming back to the keyboard again and again and again.

I haven’t yet become an no-day-without-the-line kind of writer (which I have resolved to do on at least one of my to-do lists) but 52 weeks times about 750 words is…well, it’s a book. So bravo, Bon. It’s only a novella, perhaps, but some of my favorite books – The Little Prince, 84 Charing Cross Road, The Wizard of Oz, The War of Art, Animal Farm – are just teeny-tiny but they have a pages and a front and back cover and I bought them without any qualms that they weren’t what I thought they were: a book.

But maybe, just maybe, this last year of writing has been something else. Not pee in my glass, exactly, but certainly not what I expected. I mean (said in a Monty Python voice): NOBODY EXPECTS A GLOBAL PANDEMIC. And if I was not writing my blog, I probably would not have reflected on it as much as I did – at least not for public consumption or in any coherent way. I would never have written about George Floyd or a letter to Santa Claus or about Clarence the TV Dog.

So what is this other thing? It’s a glass, of sorts, a receptacle, it’s a ball diamond in the middle of a cornfield. If I hadn’t built it, I wouldn’t have come to the page week after week. Maybe I haven’t knocked it out of the park – yet – but at least I wrote about it.

And I can let that be enough.