It's been a long, long time since I last gave writing on the blogosphere any importance or high priority in my life. It used to be the case that I easily wrote over 1,000 words each day while at university. Maybe that wasn't always a healthy thing and maybe I don't necessarily want to go back to that frame of mind, but one thing is for certain, and that is that I was always stimulated, so much sharper, with thought and ideas forever at my fingertips, on the tip of my tongue, I could enter a discussion at almost any moment and feel as though I could take on the subject matter in a critical way, play around with it, press it, squeeze it, take it apart and reassemble it. Now that feeling is gone. The ability to write has left me. Even when I try my hardest to set aside time for writing in my schedule, I have at times spent hours before the computer screen with not a single kernel of a thought passing through my mind.

I can't explain quite why or how, but I know that writing is incredibly important to me, not as an artistic tool (although that mustn't be discounted) but as an integral part of my existence as a human being in this world. Or rather, as a means of working through and figuring out the never-ending puzzle that is existence (without wishing to sound too dramatic or self-indulgent). Writing is what allows me to grab an image of thought as it floats in the ether of my consciousness, smack it down on the table and begin to dissect it... No, this is the wrong verb, the wrong way to look at thinking or writing. What writing allows me to do, is to latch on to that flash of thought and let it blindly take me to places I couldn't have possibly predicted at the start of the journey.
Similarly, I can't quite explain why thought has deserted me. I suspect it has a great deal to do with my relationship with time and work. It used to be the case that I didn't have that much to do other than read for write for my degree, which back then I considered to be my 'work'. Yet the nature of this work was so lacking in urgency, that I happily allowed myself to write in an unfocused, undirected manner whenever I wanted. Writing - writing for its own sake, for the sake of thought - was my top priority at all times, and if I was overcome by the urge to write then it would take precedence over any other urge or obligation, usually to the detriment of my course work. I was obsessed with writing; and writing, thus, became a great experiment. Not a means to understanding the world, but a thing in its own write, to be reflected upon by itself, during its own act. Writing about writing, about the meaning of writing, about the effects of writing, and so on...

And so, I feel I need to make some sort of disclaimer. In view of what writing became for me in the past before I lost it, I feel as though starting up this blog again is a way of trying to get back into writing. With blogging there sometimes comes a fear of being perceived as vain. "Why would anyone want to read my stuff? Will I come across as self important?" and so on and so forth. I am a little older now, and I can happily say that I don't worry about these things so much now, at least not half as much as I might have worried about them in the past. I don't feel the need to justify making my writing public, as I feel it to simply justify itself. I am doing this because I feel that this might somehow spur me into thinking and writing regularly once again. I don't know how to go about it exactly, so expect plenty of posts about my inability to start writing, my inability to think, and other such bilge. The results may indeed be vain at times, boring at others, or, if everything goes to plan, downright megalomaniac. And so what? No-one is free of vanity, and vanity isn't enough to rule anyone, or anything, out.