New Beginnings

I am once again sitting back overlooking the beautiful Saint John River at the Fredericton Public Library ready to once again write the introduction to my new blog. It is a trend that has recently gripped the halls of Holy Cross and I decided, after seeing a peer using this site I decided to also join in. In that way I can become a poster boy for this WordPress. But so far I am really enjoying using a regular font instead of the disjointed font of your sister blogging site, aptly named Blogger. But I digress.

I have decided to resurrect the blog because I decided it was time that I got back to writing for myself. And not because I am a copycat and decided to be a follower and not a leader. It was just I had about eight blogs on my Blogger dashboard and I just thought it was difficult to make sure I gave my attention to each of them. They ranged in topics from travel to politics to music to my general musings. This new blog is going to be a new place that I will be able to bring these topics into one collective place. Already I have imported some of my other posts from my other blogs to give you an idea of what my writing style. But this new WordPress account and blog is for me anyway a new beginning in something that I have often wished I had the time to do. And that is simply to write.

In my Grade 12 year, my favourite teacher was Mrs. Henderson, who was in my opinion a woman who seemed out-of-place in high school, she was always dressed so elegantly and spoke in such a low tone of voice that sometimes she just lulled you nearly to sleep in the middle of a busy school day. She never offered any criticisms, and never put down anyone work without complimenting someone’s work first. She was always so caring, so passionate about her subject, and it just gave me an infectious buzz. I wanted to write. I needed to write. She convinced me that if I lived my life without writing, applying pen to paper or sending my fingers flying across a keyboard, creating worlds, characters, and most importantly moments, that my life was not at all fulfilled.

That was in Grade 12 that I felt so enthusiastic about writing. Then university hit. And suddenly projects that I had worked on all summer, when I was free to explore my town as I had not been able to procure a reasonable job,was thrown by the wayside on my computer’s memory and notebooks lay in shelves collecting dust. Every now and again I would pick up my Pentel black pen and write, but I have always wanted to do more. So when I noticed people starting to write blogs, and managing to squeeze enough time to write and update their own lives, I decided it might be time for a fun challenge. And that was to create a new blog and start afresh.

Recently I have been obsessed by a song by syntho-pop solo artist Adam Young, aka Owl City, entitled “Fireflies.” It is a song that Young wrote in response to his own insomnia, but I got a few other meanings. The one that impressed upon me the most was the line “I like to believe that planet Earth spins slowly,” which I feel is the artist’s disappointment that life is going by too fast. And I have to agree with him. I still think it was yesterday that I was saying goodbye to my family in the Holy Cross parking lot last September, I still feel as my walk across the graduation stage was only a week ago, and I feel that my 2006 trip to Austria and the Czech Republic to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth was just over a month ago. I get shocked now at how quickly my days go by (a reference here to Keith Urban’s song), and I kind of want to hold on to these wonderful memories. I don’t know what tomorrow brings, and I think we would have to be fools to actively control our destinies. This blog is my way of taking time out of my day in order to slow it down and just write.

I think if Mrs. Henderson knew about this blog, she would be proud of me to once again sit down and write. This blog offers a new beginning for me, a new hope, a new place to finally consolidate all the thoughts that bump around in my head. I really hope that you enjoy the ride.

AUR