It’s a Monday afternoon. Few people stroll along the mall and, on the third floor, I find myself walking towards a Sit & Rest place, where six massage chairs are available. There were three of them in each row, facing each other. There was one that was occupied. I noticed it was silent and serene, probably the appropriate vibe. An older lady stood up and said solemnly, “There’s no assistant here. I just fell asleep.” I replied, “Okay,” wondering whether I should ask her about her sleep but added, “The machines are working though?” She said, “Yes,” and stood up slowly preparing to leave while I chose the adjacent row from her and sat down at the chair nearest to the entrance.
The older lady had gone out by now and I tried inserting my 100 peso bill in all four ways you could insert a 100 peso bill in a massage chair machine, but it still would spit it right back out. Not minding this, I stood up and tried the middle chair. The money slipped through as though it were the most natural thing in the world. And the chair started to lean back, the machine whirring and massaging my soul.
Blogging is like trying on different massage chairs
I wanted to take this moment to remind ourselves how we are all trying massage chairs as we blog and write our hearts out. Sometimes, we get the perfect massage chair but it doesn’t turn out to have relieved us of our aches. And other times, we thought the massage chair wasn’t as good, but it actually left us feeling so much more revived. It actually worked.
Much like blogging, we tend to throw our stuff out there into the ether. Personally, I have not had the conscious intention of having a blog post stick and go viral. Perhaps in the back of my mind, I wanted it to be so but the truest intention I have for blogging was and always has been to be able to resonate and connect with someone on the other side.
Blogging is like the older lady that said she slept here
In our human experience, we often discover that we want our stories to be known even if no one asked for them. I feel like this is all blogging really is. It’s an invitation to a conversation that you start as a blogger, a conversation that you wanted to start in the first place.
I slept here isn’t so much an ego-thing f announcing to everyone that I was here. But it is an acknowledgment that I was here. I blogged. I wrote things. I tried. I experimented. And I wanted for you to find me in this journey so we can share it.
I slept here is capturing the creativity in our hearts and minds and recording them in written form. I slept here means I wanted to let you know what I just went through to let you have an idea of what you can have as well. It is creating a shared experience.
Blogging is relaxing into you
One thing that I often find myself in is wondering whether what I said or did was appropriate or if it offended anyone or something along those lines. For short, I’m very self-conscious about the things I put out verbally, creatively, or otherwise. This gives you an idea of how reserved I can be in conversations.
In a physical conversation, we often have to think with our feet (or at least I do) because the exchange is very rapid and prolonged silence somehow sometimes makes a conversation awkward. But in writing, you have more time to think and process. You get to tap into your heart space more. You get to relax and set the vibe and find your sweet spot.
In Conclusion
Blogging is very much alive in 2022. Somehow, people have pegged blogging to be be strictly about writing. But the meaning of blogging itself is “web logging.” It’s logging whatever is in your mind into the web, on the Internets, for public consumption. And this happens every single day, millions of times a day, through TikTok posts, Instagram reels, Facebook stories, and so much more. They are all still blogging, just in a different form.
In a way, we are hoping to connect. We hope to understand and be understood. This collective and innate need to listen to and share stories has been weaved through all humanity and I feel like it has been what has kept our hearts afire all these thousands of years later. The technology may have changed and we could call it many things like blogging or writing or drawing on cave walls, but the stories are there. The potential to resonate is there. The creativity is there. The creativity was always there, captured, recorded, documented, preserved, remembered, and absorbed. Your story, my story, our story is just there and we can tweak it, change it, update it however it served us, such is the freedom of creativity. 💙