A New Year’s Restart

It has been almost a month since I last blogged. A few days after publishing my last entry about football, I took off to Boulder and Denver for a short vacation and got sick during the trip. With chills, aches, fever, hacking coughs, and the whole nine yards, I ended up spending much of the trip lying in bed in the hotel. Even after returning to New York, it took another couple of weeks to fully recover.

Being sick is nothing new to me. For the last few years, I have gotten sick at least twice a year. But this time was different. The physical misery was no worse than before, but the mental misery was surprisingly more visceral.

Before (i.e., when I was still working as a lawyer), a bad cold was a nuisance – something that I just needed to push through. Important work awaited and only I, so I thought, knew the ins and outs of the transaction. So I would drag myself out of bed, go to the office or, if I felt really awful and the work permitted, my home office, to get the work done. Although I would be miserable physically, I felt heroic. I would give myself a pat on the back for my work ethic, not to mention the potential brownie points I might get from the partners at the firm.

This time around, I was at first thankful that I could stay in bed as long as I wanted, but soon got restless after a couple of days. I was energetic enough to be out of bed, but was not well enough to get back to my normal routine. I could read any one of the dozen books I had checked out from the library or ruminate about what I wanted to do with my life after law, but I didn’t feel like doing either. I didn’t want to have thoughts about my future, my purpose and passion (if any), and the feasibility of various opportunities swirling in my mind. I knew the best way to stop these swirling thoughts was to streamline and write them down and perhaps blog about them, but I didn’t feel like doing that either.

Perhaps I was lazy, perhaps I was scared to admit my insecurities to myself, or perhaps I was just tired of trying to figure things out. I wished circumstances would dictate what I must do – like they did when I was working – rather than putting me at the helm to choose what I wanted to do when I didn’t know what I wanted.

As days passed, my malaise continued. And the more days passed without blogging, the more guilty I felt about not blogging. Not blogging turned into a symbol of my malaise. And of course, the more guilty I felt about it, the higher the resistance I needed to overcome. It became a downward spiral. During the worst moments, everysixminutes felt like an albatross. So I decided to put blogging on the back burner for as long as I needed and until the desire resurfaced on its own.

The fact that I am writing this entry now means that the desire has resurfaced. It actually resurfaced over the holidays (the reason why is the subject for another post to come), but I figured that it is lame to be blogging over Christmas and no one would visit the site anyway. But to my surprise when I checked my blog stats today (for the first time since I decided to put blogging on the back burner), readership hasn’t dropped significantly. And in the last few days I even received several emails from readers I don’t know inquiring whether I have decided to quit blogging.

No, I haven’t quit blogging and I am back! I am not a big fan of New Year resolutions. Instead, I thought it would be apt to post this entry today – the start of a new decade. Sometimes, restarts matter as much as new starts.