My Struggle, What’s Next With this Blog?

A letter to myself from last year:

I believe myself to be weak. I get frustrated too easily of late. I don’t know what it is. It dawned on me today as I was playing my rudiments: I am not content with my vocabulary when it comes to drumming or playing guitar, at all.

And on top of that I want to be a philosopher. But I could never compare to anyone who is a philosopher. I am not in the state of contentment. To me there’s nothing else that matters at the moment than to excel and be better than I was the day before.

I listen to John Mayer’s Slow Dancing in a Burning Room, I listen to Carter Beauford play his triplet roll, I read books about men like CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and Owen Barfield, people that devote their entire lives to writing and reading and barely make it. How do I plan on making it if I spend so little time in each of these?

Sure I read. But do I read 8 hours a day and then write for four? Sure I play drums but I don’t play in a band, rarely do I practice with a drum kit. Yes I play guitar, some would say fairly well. But I know that if I were to sit next to someone who understands scales, in the case of guitar, and timing, in the case of drumming, I’d come out as a child that is just pretending to be a musician.

And there are many out there who know more about this than I do. And so my mood is off. This day I spent walking around downtown, trying to play drums, trying to learn, hitting the pad as hard as I can. I tried to learn new things on the guitar, blues scales. But still I feel like I won’t use these things.

And when I write I don’t see the emotions that CS Lewis had. And I don’t read back on it as if I was a legend. This is my struggle. So I get frustrated and easily so. I do not think I would be content with my skill.

This is what I wrote a year ago.

Now as I look back, I ask myself: has anything changed?

I am absolutely committed to my goals in life. This state that I was in when I wrote that was the state of discomfort. And that discomfort led me to play and play. And now as I play guitar I am honestly surprised with my skill. It is interesting how that works. Honestly, I am surprised with what I can do on guitar now. And my fingers hurt. I am surprised with how much I wrote this summer and how diligent I was with it. I am surprised with how many blogs I produced: 35 to be exact. Some of them are worse than others. But still - I see progress.

And I want to keep that coming.

For the rest of 2017, September — December, I want to be making 2 blogs a week. Mainly to have a lot of content and to be accountable to myself to just produce material that is digestible. I understand that not everyone is going to read them. But eventually, maybe I will have weekly readers. That is my hope. Maybe when I look back at this, I’ll be happy that I kept myself accountable. And if I have this on my blog — I know — that I’ll be able to do it.

I spent a month without eating sugar. And I’m going to make it a lifestyle now. I don’t desire sugar anymore — at all.

What You Should Expect from the Blog

I will be writing mainly on philosophy. I have been reading, The Moral Animal by Thomas Nagel. The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis, The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky, etc.

I am taking two philosophy courses this semester so I’ll be writing on what my course demands as well and I plan to post things up on this blog from those courses. If you have subscribed to this channel, I want to say, I appreciate it. From the bottom of my heart. And I want to be making a lot of great stuff, both on YouTube and on Medium.

I plan on writing music and being in a band, on the side of making some covers and play-alongs and starting a YouTube channel.

The end goal with this blog is to digitalize it and make videos as well as written versions. I hope that people would be able to benefit from that.

My hope is that people would benefit from everything I do. I want my life to about people . . . a lot of people. That is my dream.