Did you make it past my last post on the Chromebook? Not my best blogging moment at all, but I wrote it because of a conversation over Christmas, and it resulted in a great conversation this past weekend. Read on.

It’s no secret that I have struggled with my writing lately. Lately being, oh, the last several months. I had a weekly goal to publish my ‘musings’ and I started to slip. A skipped week easily becomes months of no posts.

Over Christmas I was at a party with good friends. Kids dashed everywhere, friends who had not seen each other in a long while caught up with each other. It was a perfectly lovely evening. As I wandered about I started chatting with a lawyer friend. Well, in reality he started chatting with me.

“Why don’t you write your blog anymore?” I really did not know what to say, eventually stammered out something like, “You know about my blog?” My friend said that, yes, he was a subscriber, that he liked my take on things, my writing ‘voice’, and that he had noticed that it had been a while since I had written a post. I was floored. I had no idea that some of what I said here had an impact in a positive or thought-provoking way with anyone, and certainly if it did I never thought it important enough that it would be noticed if I stopped a while. I left inspired to write.

Then I didn’t.

Six weeks passed with me intending to pick up on the inspiring words from that party. Life took over. In a fit of ‘lets just ship some work‘ I wrote a post on my experience with my new Chromebook. It was, if nothing else, a vehicle to try and get me writing again.

Then I didn’t.

This past Friday night my wife and I hosted eight friends over for a dinner party. It was a wonderful evening, with some coming by boat on a perfectly still and starry evening. For the first time in a long while I did the menu selection and all the cooking. Homemade pistachio ice cream is totally worth the effort by the way. As we chatted over dessert one of our guests turned to me.

“Why don’t you write your blog anymore?” I was, again, at a loss for words. “Your last post on the Chromebook was not really what your blog is about,” she went on. I tried to come up with the right way to frame why I wrote that piece but it sounded like so many excuses. She then asked, “Why do you write a blog?”

Legacy. I want some form of legacy.

Artists have art. Musicians have recordings. Aside from my business and civic involvement, I suppose on some not-so-humble level I want some form of permanent legacy. Something to be remembered for. Something for my children to look on in the future and have a better understanding of who their dad is or was. On a secondary level, related to legacy, I want to write a book. A regular blog post was a way for me to gain the discipline to sit and write regularly.

In answering the question I was calling myself out. Much of what I have written is nothing close to answering the question of who I am or what my viewpoint is. And, strangely (to me at least), my viewpoint seems to be more of what my readers want to read.

So, this post. This post is the result of my conversation with my dinner guest, a conversation I am so grateful for. The conversation over dinner was the result of a post that I wrote to try to break my writers block and reach out to readers such as my friend who asked me about my blogging over Christmas. I have come to the realization that I was trying to be too many things, with how-to articles, computer reviews, book reviews. I was all over the place in my writing and it probably contributed to the lack of productivity here on my blog.

My dinner guest summed up the writing and observations that most resonate with her.

Moments.

Highlighting moments, glimpses of interactions, twists of words, these are the posts that have always seemed to garner the most comments. These are the posts people talk to me about. Mostly, these are the posts that will help others know who I am and what I stand for. Legacy, through moments.

Thank you for sticking around as a subscriber while I drifted a bit. Hopefully ‘moments’ resonate with you also as I share more of them with you.