Coming to the end of a very tough year

I have not abandoned this blog. It may seem like I have because my posts have been infrequent this year. But I'm always thinking about it. Every day at least one thing happens that I think I should write up and post but often, I only take notes about it and don't finish it. Most of my ideas, though, leave my head as soon as they enter it. One of the best "explanations" of this I know about is in Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers where an alien spaceship is influencing the minds of the people who come near it. The influence involves the people coming up with brilliant ideas or knowing how to do things they couldn't do previously - especially technical things. They start to invent things no one could have imagined before. But people only traveling through the area get fleeting ideas that they lose when they pass out of the influence of the spaceship. They try hard to remember their ideas but can't. That's because the original influence is lost.

That's how I often feel when I walking or driving along and have these incredible, lucid thoughts. But if I don't write them down immediately, I seem to pass out of the area that influenced my mind. It's not an alien spaceship, of course, that caused the idea in the first place. I'm not sure if it's Divine influence or just randomly varying ideas in my mind coming together in a once-in-long-time conjunction that causes the ideas to appear and then disappear. All I know is that if I could remember a tenth of the ideas I have and then lose, I'd have written hundreds of posts a year instead of the 34 I've written so far this year.

If the ideas come while I'm driving the car, I would have to pull over at the side of the road to write them down. Fat chance of that! I'm always late or near to running late. So, if I'm in the car, I never pull over when ideas come along. Usually, though, I'm riding my scooter and I'm used to pulling over to let faster, impatient drivers pass me. So, pulling over to write in a notebook shouldn't be that hard. Honda was even nice enough to have a glove box that is easy to get to without needing to open up the seat or dig through my jacket for a notebook (see the area circled in red in the picture here). But I don't do it because, as with the car, I'm usually running late or close to late.

In an earlier post, "My thoughts on walking", I mention that it's a good idea to write down the ideas that come while you're walking (item 6).

"I find I get some really good ideas while I'm out for my walks. But I also find that these ideas are fleeting. I get so many thoughts and see so many things that the ideas can fly away as fast as they alight. It's great to be able to pull a small notebook and pencil out and jot down the ideas before I forget them."

I don't do that enough, either. And how many times have I gone back through the pages and pages I've filled in that walking notebook? Not as many times as I should. But that is going to change.

This is one of my New Year's Resolutions. I am going to try to get back to my old frequency of writing posts in this blog. My first few may be about what kept me from writing more this year. Other posts may be about projects I've worked on, books I've read and movies I've seen. There have been some wonderful sermons from the pastor of our church I'd like to highlight and the Lord has taught me some important things this year. My son and I sang in our church's Christmas program again this year. That was fun and enlightening. There are so many things to write about! To paraphrase the old hymn, "How can I keep from writing?"