The best intentions

You know, it's kind of funny. I was just reading over what I wrote yesterday and I realized just how often things do not end up turning out the way we think they are going to.

My original idea when I started yesterday was to start out with referencing me sending my friend a book that I thought would be good for his overall growth as a person and then to provide a couple of other examples about how there are no shortcuts to getting what you want in life. That quite obviously did not happen yesterday. No worries, it will keep for another day. And if it is truly important it will come out eventually.

My writing here frequently veers off at some obtuse angle and I end up talking about something quite different than I had meant to at first. But, that should not and indeed does not really surprise me. The reason for this is that my method for writing these posts is not really structured at all.

I know that many people feel that you should have some kind of outline before you begin writing with predetermined talking points and perhaps an ordered list or two all set up and a clear beginning, a  middle and an end and some way of tying it all up with a neat little bow. That method seldom works for me.  And even if it did, as you may have noticed with some of the three and four part posts, sometimes, I have trouble keeping what I have to say down to 2000 words or so even when I have no real plan for what to say.

Don't get me wrong. I am a big proponent of having a vision and a flexible action plan and working the plan until you reach your goal. And there are many areas of my life that are structured as such. This just is not one of them. And this is working for me.

Some days while I am writing about one thing a thought will occur to me about something else that I should say but that does not fit in with the current topic. Sometimes I will backtrack a little bit and find some way of making the two topics merge. Other times I will jot down a sentence or two about the new topic in a notepad file on my computer and save it for the next day.

Most of the time though, before I begin writing, I have absolutely no idea what it is that I am going to talk about. I sit down at my computer desk with my wireless keyboard in my lap. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths. With my eyes still closed, I ask the universe what I should talk about. After a few brief moments thoughts and ideas begin to flow towards me. Some of those thoughts and ideas resonate with things that have happened recently in my life and I take a moment or two to reflect on those things, and think about how I feel about them and what other things they remind me of. After a couple of more minutes I have a rough idea of several concepts that I could write about.

If those things are similar I do what I can to include them all. If they are not I pick the one about which I have the most to say, or the one that I am the most passionate about and begin writing. Then I just walk down the path that my heart and my mind together tell me to travel until I am done for the moment.

I do not worry about whether or not what I said in the end was what I meant to at the start. It is my firm belief that what I say in each post is what needs to be said at the time. There is someone for whom what I say is the perfect thing for me to have said. Maybe it is you and maybe it is not. I believe that eventually all of the important things I have to say will come out. And, I intend to be writing for a long time yet to come.

As long as my words are mostly positive and empowering, and I am either teaching a lesson to others, learning a lesson myself or chronicling some event where either or both can happen I am happy with my results. And I hope you are too.