“This blog is about leaving my footprint behind when I go. It's also about finding out who I am now, even if it's a different person each day. It's about thinking, feeling, learning and changing - and about laughing too, I hope; and it's about filling my life with new people and making each new day interesting.”
I found this statement about blogging as I was surfing around one afternoon and I copied and pasted it, wishing I had written it myself because it said so perfectly how I feel about blogging. Then the doorbell rang, I hit the wrong key and promptly lost my connection and by the time I returned to my computer I was unable to return to the blog where I had found it – the big frustration of the day.
I am not claiming in any way that these are my words, but they did make me think about what it’s like to be able to leave that “footprint” behind – so much better than a diary because this is shared with other people. It’s a way for me to leave a kind of legacy to my children. It has become, for me, a new way to learn about myself, to explore places within me that I would have been afraid to see in earlier stages of my life. It has helped me realize that in many ways I am a different person each day. I am learning more each day, not only about myself, but about others and how we interact, how we manage to touch those similar strings in the instruments of our lives and enjoy the music that we create together. And it is about laughter, joy, being able to see the beauty in our world, as well as in the those who inhabit our world, those that add to our joy and our laughter.
It offers each of us the opportunity to reach out, to meet others, to exchange thoughts and ideas and laughter. It helps us to see our many similarities with others as well as helping to define our differences with others, but whatever, we never come away empty handed.
So, to whomever wrote this, I say thank you. You have helped me to define the pleasure and excitement and the sense of fulfillment that blogging has brought into my life. And I’m also glad that it has come to me at this stage of life as I have such a rich tapestry to explore and to enjoy.
Sylvia's world in thoughts and pictures
I miss you Sam!!
I miss you Sam!!
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What Can I Say?
I'm interested in almost everything. Use to like to travel, but it's too expensive now. I take Tai Chi classes, swim, volunteer in a Jump-start program for pre-schoolers. I'm an avid reader and like nearly everyone these days I follow politics avidly. I'm a former teacher and Special Projects Coordinator for a Telecommunications company, Assistant to the President of a Japanese silicon wafer manufacturing company. Am now enjoying retirement -- most of the time. I have two daughters, one son-in-law and two sons scattered all over the country. No grandchildren.
13 comments:
Sylvia !! This is so heart touching !! I am glad to find your blog !! Great post..Very well said..
Yes! I think of it as finding my "voice". The blogs I enjoy and read most often each have a distinctive "voice". They make me think, teach me something new or show me something interesting. Often I could tell who wrote it without looking.
When we develop our blogging "voice" we must think about what is important to us and how we want to present ourselves to others.
Your poetic comment "how we manage to touch those similar strings in the instruments of our lives and enjoy the music that we create together." touched a string in my heart. So beautifully written, Sylvia, and you have given voice to so many of us who blog.
Beautifully put; now a bookmark. Blogging has given me so many gifts since I began, and you summed it up wonderfully right here. Thanks Sylvia!
Wonderful, Sylvia! I think we all have a desire to know ourselves and be known, as strongly as we do to love and be loved.
You said it so vary well, Sylvia. And I do feel I am leaving my children a look into who I am. Perhaps they will have a little better perspective on their mother than I was ever able to find of mine.
My feeling is that blogs are not a legacy for the long term, i.e., they won't last for a century as new technology takes over and blogs become obsolete.
Books, on the other hand, can and do last for a century. So, Sylvia, make a collection of your best blog essays and publish it in book form!
Thank you Sylvia for finding the right words! I feel so blessed to have met so many wonderful people here and I thank my friend kay for pushing me ever so gently to stick my toe in....
Footprints ...
You once put this little sentence on your blog Sylvia and I asked if I could use it on mine. It's still there. You didn't know who wrote it, but it reached my soul:
'The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.'
To me my blogs are (hopefully) for two way communication and sharing with others. My 'footprint', I think, will be left elsewhere. It will probably be quite intangible.
June in Oz
Sylvia, that's a beautiful post, and very well said.
I don't know if this is where you saw the Footprint statement, but take a look, http://judithtaylor.blogspot.com/
Linda,I am happy to say that you were right and Sylvia found her way back to my blog again, and I had an email from her this morning.
Sylvia, I love the way you have expanded on my 'footprint' idea and made so much more out of it. Sometimes I say things as they pop into my head, without having really thought them through - now you have done it for me.
I have never really analyzed why I blog. I haven't thought of it as a legacy, but more a sharing of the right now. I do know that I love to learn about my cyber friends and to receive their comments. It's a way of regaining something I lost when I retired.
I wrote a diary for years and no-one saw it but me! I wrote verses for children but no-one ever heard them but the children in my classes. This blogging business is a wonderful way of leaving a footprint behind.
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