Blogging One Hundred And Fifty-Two Days In A Row

Blogging one hundred and fifty-two days in a row is an interesting challenge. It encourages you to think of something daily, for months in a row. It also forces you to have the discipline to sit and attempt to write for one or two hours a day, whether inspiration is there or not. Often it isn’t. Add to this that most blog posts get zero views and you have a reason to stop and give up.

You don’t. One of the reasons to write a blog post a day is to train yourself to be disciplined, like with studying a new language, or a new skill. You sit down, you procrastinate, you look for ideas and inspirations. You start to write, and eventually, you’re left with a blog post.

Writing, video editing, web development, camera work, climbing, and plenty of things take consistent practice to improve. It is only by constant practice that we improve our skills, or get into bad habits, whichever comes first. Initially, I wanted to try journalling and I tried a few apps but eventually, I got tired of writing, what I felt was, useless drivel.

By writing a blog post I made the challenge harder because whatever I write can be read. Luckily, when you’re learning, people latch onto individual works, rather than the entire blog. I can get away with most of the writing being uninteresting. The challenge is to improve my writing and to find something more inspiring to write about. I need to find something that is niche enough for me to be one of the few writers, but broad enough to attract an audience.

An article about Genre theory did that, another about Suunto and climbing, and other articles had that unique relevance to attract readers. These articles are rare, because it is hard to write something unique during a pandemic when we are still self-isolating.

If and when the pandemic ends, and if I am still not too old to do things, then these blog posts will become interesting again, and I will have more writing practice. For now I am trying to find inspiration during pandemic self-isolation where from Monday to Sunday and from January to December nothing changes.

Writing a blog post a day forces me to have a spontaneous conversation with you, despite no conversations taking place in person for days, or even weeks in a row. Being single and solitary, during a pandemic, is a unique experience, that those that we hear, do not understand. If they did understand this they would do everything they could to get back to COVID-zero. I would then have no reason to write blog posts. I would be socialising, rather than self-isolating.

So what have I learned after 152 days of blogging? That the pandemic allows us to pick up habits that we would lose interest in if we were in a normal cycle of life. I still like to blog, and to read blogs. I am going to keep this habit up for as long as possible. I look forward to when we will be living more interesting lives, once the pandemic is over.