Why I Like Blogging So Much (Part 1)

The last 24 hours was a powerful example of why I’m really liking this blogging thing – both as a blogger myself, and as a blog reader. Tom Vander Well, when he bestowed upon me membership in his Mug Club, asked what made me an optimist. That was a very good question for me, and I’ve been contemplating a response for some time. After all, I just didn’t “become” one out of thin air, right? As it happened, last night things started to get a bit clearer – first I read a post by Chris Cree on how he was working on being an optimist, and was having a bit of difficulty. I, of course being an optimist, wanted to help, so I started to type a comment, and while admitting it wasn’t the whole answer, at least a piece of it came out: “While I haven’t constructed the long answer yet for my blog, I can tell you this – I was lucky to have initial mentors early in my career that were relentlessly optimistic, to the point where “can’t” was just not a part of their vocabulary. That may be a key, just simply “drafting” off of another optimist (or multiple optimists, and there’s a lot of good ones out there in the blogosphere).”

So I was making progress. Last night I also posted to this blog about the use of the word “but”, which was read and commented on by Christine Kane today. As a result this evening I visited her blog and read a post entitled “10 Ways to Set a Powerful Intent”. I was wowed – this was great writing. And then I had a “eureka” moment – that post does about as good of a job of describing the process I went through to become an optimist as I could ever hope to do with a post of my own! Here’s the comment I made: “This is a wonderful post, in that it really crystalizes the “way” to being an optimist. Since I started blogging people had been asking me how I “became” an optimist, and after I read this I thought – this is how! It just didn’t happen out of thin air. One day I had to say, “I’m going to be happy”, and decide to stop complaining (too much), to think forward rather than backward, to use more postive language, and to look at the glass half full instead of half empty. Yes, that took a heck of a lot of intent. Thanks for the “documentation” of this journey!”

There’s actually a connection to my earlier response to Chris and the path outlined by Christine – the optimist “drafting” I described is a very similar to Christine’s concept of having an “encouraging partner” (number 9).

Isn’t the blogosphere wonderful? Yep.