Passion.

Some have noticed that I haven’t written in the blog for nearly two weeks. There are a couple of reasons for this and to those of you that reached out to make sure that I was OK, have no fear, my life is better than ever.

A while back I commented that I had hoped to do more with my blog, after all, it’s been around for over 12 years and I’ve met some really nifty people as a result of having this blog. But the times have changed and since blogging was around long before the big social networks, I’ve started to wonder how “out loud” I want to live my life. I’ve been pretty open and honest in my musings on this blog thing and lately I haven’t felt the need to be that way. I think I’ve become more accustomed to the controlled atmosphere of the social networks, where I have control of who is seeing what content. With my blog in its current format, I don’t really have that luxury.

I still love to write but I’m feeling the need to write about specific topics these days. This blog has been a catch-all for everything that has gone on in my life since August 2001, and that’s all well and good, I suppose, but again, there’s that privacy issue that I’m started to be conscious of.

Another thing that kind of irked me about my blog is that I received an email from a person who wanted to start contributing to my blog because I haven’t written enough about a certain subject. Years ago I wrote a blog entry about a long-gone discount department store chain and it still ranks quite high when you search for that chain on Google. The comments to that one entry have connected many former employees together and I think that’s wonderful. That being said, I don’t want to devote a blog to discount department store chains, I just don’t have that interest and quite frankly this is my sandbox and the only other person that would ever be allowed to write in this blog is Earl and he’s going to that he would say, “not in your dreams.”

I am thinking about writing about my flight training and my journey to becoming a private pilot. My lessons are going well, yesterday I started the “next chapter”, as it is, with slow flight and turns at a point. I still can’t describe how much I love flying but when I’m in the airplane, all cares, concerns and worries melt away as soon as we lift off the runway. Learning to become a pilot requires focus, discipline and a whole bunch of work, but those elements are effortless for me because, well, I get to fly! I don’t think I want to write about my student pilot journey on this blog, so I haven’t quite figured out how I want to parse that information out yet. There are a lot of pilots that film their flights, edit them to a beautiful presentation and then share them on YouTube and/or their personal webspaces. I’m not ready for the filming part yet, I’d be too distracted, but the writing part, that’s something I think I’ll do.

I mentioned to Earl that I was really considering just shutting down this blog but he urged me to think about it for a while before doing so. So I’m going to leave it here for now and see if the mood strikes me again when the days get longer or something.

In the meanwhile, I’m here, all is well and I’m lucky because I’m a guy that’s learning how to fly.

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Photo courtesy of another student that rode along and snapped a photo during my lesson yesterday.