TEN YEARS OF MADUKOVICH’S COGITATIONS

Without sounding immodest, I must confess that I’d always felt I would still be blogging ten years since starting on here, as long as I lived to see the time. One thing I didn’t envisage though is not putting out offerings with the same energy and frequency like I did in the early days. I’d thought to blame it on work, only to find that I even work less these days than I used to ten years back, even though my responsibilities have since exponentially increased, but should I put the blame on that? I hate to say that the paucity of writing on my part is due to a loss of interest, because I know it isn’t, in fact I think about writing all the time, even when most times the thinking of it, hardly translates to the doing these days.

I have also not had frequent visits by my muse as it used to be, as bouts of inspiration leave me almost as soon as they hit me, something that wasn’t a usual occurrence in the early days, hence you’d find many opened topics with first paragraphs in my notebook, with a few of the thoughts I’d started to express remaining incomplete and not further explored. The temptation is always there to just write anything to make up the space but I’ve since learnt not to continue writing just anything once I lose the prodding, especially since if I do otherwise I’ll still have myself to flagellate for not meeting even my own meek standards. Very recently, like I noted in the post before this 👉🏽WHY I WRITE https://madukovich.wordpress.com/2023/04/06/why-i-write I had to modify a post I’d written way back because I was embarrassed with the offering. It is something I hope not to repeat ever again.

It’s not like every post I make needs to be perfect or even make sense (if I can help it), In fact I have posts that time and experience have changed my views about, but it is better they remained in the original, allowing me to write new ones, while citing the former to show a better understanding of the subject that the passage of time has allowed me to garner, which those that read me will come to appreciate. That is why I don’t continue writing on a subject I’ve lost taste for, or lack the prodding for, but when I come across them, and still have nothing to add I simply move on, hoping that one day it will come, and the needful will be done. Many of such posts I’ve been able to turn around, a few of them remain just as I’d left them, sometimes just as topics.

The one thing that counts for achievement for me in this game so far, is the fact that since I started I haven’t missed a month without at least a blog post in all of my ten years of blogging. Hence though there may not have been the frequency as I’d have loved for it to be, there is consistency, howbeit a slow but (if I might add) a steady one. Even that is enough to celebrate, to answer the nagging question of whether there’s really anything to celebrate, that keeps gnawing at my innards. It was when I found that I was almost finding it difficult to put my thoughts down in writing over a period of a month, that I decided to stop waiting for the right conditions, but to create one myself, at least once a month. Since I made that decision, I found that the moment I make up my mind to write something, that one for the month, I force my must to turn up to do my thing. Thereafter, inspiration for other writings may come up and I’ll let them in, and they may just become the second or third offering for the month.

It is often said that if you want to know where you’re going, you must know where you’re coming from, and for this I think it is pertinent that I tell you where I’m coming from, even though I must’ve at some point or the other mentioned it in a few of my posts of yore. I remember why I decided to blog in the first place, and it was because I had failed at writing a novel, as I couldn’t settle for just that one story, with my mind jumping from one story to the other. In fact, I diagnosed myself with having s short attention span, and I’ve written about that severally, hence once I have an idea, I quickly start noting it before I lose focus. Those who are familiar with my story, will recall that I had stated that I once had a story written (what could’ve been my novel) in a diary, and gave it to a colleague at work to read, but because she finished her housemanship and left without any intention on our part to locate each other, I let it go. I did feel back then that since writing comes easily to me, it was no big deal as I would do another one, even the same story better presented, but it never happened. The other opportunity I got to reach out to her to retrieve the diary, didn’t work out because she’d become recently widowed at the time, and I hadn’t fashioned me Condolence Visit should, and I felt it would be insensitive to bring the matter of the diary up, and again like I already stated, I believed I could simply write another, or do a better version of the story.

It was actually the second attempt at writing a novel that I failed at. When I couldn’t continue with the train of thought with which I started, I wrote a different story in the next chapter, till it dawned on me that it may just be the only way to progress in this career until such a time I could be focused on just one thing, enough to make a novel out of it. Now, after I had come to that decision, and progressed on that front, I had the big notepad I was writing on soaked, and most of what I’d written became unreadable and unrestorable (at least not with the technology at my disposal), and how to preserve my writings became the next issue for me. At this time, I was already writing long stories on Facebook notes and updating long statuses, and even seen some blogs and hoped that one day I’d be able to have my own blog.

And that was how I started blogging, initially on Blogger, before I started on WordPress, so even though I’ve been blogging here for ten years, it’s been longer on Blogspot, which I had to take a leave from because I didn’t easily get a hang on how it worked, but returned to it much later after understanding the system. I then made the former my local story blog, while the latter became everything that could minister to just about anyone, anywhere on this terra firma including without excluding extra terrestrial forms and life, if they can read us. Sadly, I always nurse the fear that all those could simply be wiped out with an unfortunate click on a delete icon, especially now that sharing materials to other networks is becoming tasking. Presently, I can’t share my posts onto Facebook from my WordPress, while the spaces continue to shrink, meaning that once you lose the site, everything there is gone, maybe forever.

That grim reality still stares me in the face, especially in the face of hackers and the limitless power they possess when it comes to things on the web. There’s also ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE to worry about, because with such a tool now available, almost free to anyone intending to use it, and with the kind of ready information that can be procured at ones fingertips, the blogger seems to stand no chance against the offerings of AI. I hate to think that AI is an existential threat, but hating to think that something ain’t what it is, don’t stop it from being what it is. If therefore it is what it is, then I’m happy I do have a profession, and can understand why The American Screenwriters Association, ASA went on strike in Hollywood very recently, not for the first time in recent times, but this time mainly because of the growing influence of AI in the film and TV industry.

Away from the downs, it is the ups, that make me return to writing, or better still blogging. On the one hand, my writing has opened vistas of opportunities for me, including positions that have in no little way projected me further than I would’ve without it, but that is a subject for another day. On a very personal note, each time I finish a post and publish it there’s this sense of fulfillment that comes to me, some sort of satisfaction that brings some peace within me. Even when I feel exhausted, in the case where the post took so much out of me, like when I make posts that are very personal to me, say of a deep sense of loss, it always feels like some load has been lifted off my shoulders, and I find that the rest of that day, or night feels lighter and easier to navigate. Writing in itself almost feels like shrinking for me, such that most times it feels like I’d just come off a session, with the attendant levitation that accompanies such an exercise.

It has been a journey of discovery for me though, not of anything or anyone particularly, but of myself. A bit of me is expressed in all of what I write even in the stories that aren’t personal, including the very dark ones, so much so that I have now come to understand how it is that when you stare so long into the abyss, it stares back at you. Sometimes, when I want to see how I’ve changed in my thought processes, I go through my old posts, and like I said earlier even some of the ones I’ve become uncomfortable with today, I left, just to remind myself of the changes I’ve undergone within that space of time, making me wonder where my thoughts would be in another decade or more. So far, I have no regrets, and the time spent has been truly rewarding, and even just finishing this is causing me to heave a big sigh, right before publishing. Thank you for taking part of your precious time to read this, and the other offerings I have presented in the last ten years on this platform. I remain eternally grateful.

‘kovich