BOO!

It’s me! I’m still here! It’s not over yet, folks!

That’s what I’d say to the readers of this blog, if I had any. As it is, I suppose I’m just talking to myself. That’s fine.

I’m coming up on the one-year anniversary of getting my first real job since leaving grad school. I guess I needed a one-year sabbatical, because lately I’ve been itching to reclaim many aspects of my life that I feel like I lost when I got a job. I just looked back on my 2016 blog entries, which are few, and apparently I never wrote about these feelings publicly. I did write about them in my private journal, however. While many great things came from my being employed, I also felt like a big part of me was lost. So many things that had defined me, aspects of my life and personality that I felt were being richly developed, things that were exhilarating and meaningful to me, quickly fell to the wayside. I just didn’t have time for them, and because I was so busy and preoccupied with other things, I hardly cared that those major parts of my life and personality had seemingly vanished. The one exception was music, which I made a greater priority in 2016 than it had been in years, possibly decades. I started taking guitar lessons again, and it has been a wonderfully fruitful endeavor. I’m loving it. But other things were lost, some more gradually than others, and I am only now starting to yearn for them again. Case in point, I read one book in 2016. One. A single book! I used to read between 40 and 50 books per year, and in 2016 I read one. Insanity! Well, now I really want to read again. I’m actually craving it, and I’m actually halfway through a book already. (Hugely impressive, isn’t it?) I also feel a strong desire to rekindle my spiritual life, which has been severely lacking over the last several months. And yes, I have a renewed interest in writing. Hence, this blog post.

It’s always temping after a long break in writing to try to sum up everything that’s happened between the previous entry and today. That ain’t going to happen. I’m stopping here. But there will be more to come. I truly believe this. We’ll see if I’m right.