A journey into Blogging

I am making a recap of 2011; all I wanted to be and do. I will not mention the numerous goals I had my eyes set for, some were achieved and some are yet to be achieved in a newly started year. One of the most exciting things with life is that it opens up new opportunities and avenues for one to make more goals through the year let alone the ‘new year resolutions”. If you choose not to make resolutions as I read on a friend’s social site post, he chose not to make resolutions because “resolutions don’t really work out at times”, therefore it is better starting off a new year without them and working smart/ to your best through the year. I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss that thinking, because maybe it is true that you can actually work your way through a year perhaps bettering what you had started on previously. Also, you can decide to be a bit too comfortable to try something new in a new year such that with time, you establish a routine to your life. Recently I read something by Henrik Edberg, a blogger and writer on positive thinking. He says that

sometimes we make new year goals and struggle very hard through the year to achieve them but when we seem not to be getting there, we get very frustrated and give up(for some of us we revert to our old habits if the  resolutions involved a change of a certain habit). He brings in a different approach to resolution making; Instead of focusing on a resolution, how about you decide to concentrate on the steps that get you to the resolution. For instance, if your resolution is to cut down weight like I am doing currently (I tried this last year but it didn’t work. I am still heavy on pounds which was a bit disappointing when I sat down to review my 2011 goals). But I have got a better idea today from Henrik on how I will achieve my weight loss goal, how about I make a resolution of the number of times I want to work out weekly and for how long. As I do that, I will cut down my weight and consequently achieve my main goal. So the idea behind this is to concentrate more on what you will do about a resolution and not what the overall resolution is all about.

During 2011, I realized that I could be able to share out my thoughts and experiences in life with friends regardless of where they are. It is not always that friends are there with you to sit down all day and listen to some of the interesting or heartbreaking moments you go through. But with technology which the whole world is grateful for by now, you can easily sit down and communicate with your friends and who knows new people who might get encouraged and learn from your experiences. I decided to try blogging. But after so much whining and doing pieces of write-ups and deleting them all, I never started anything. January 2012 came and I am still me, with ambitions to blog. But I think this time round it is happening. At least I have learnt that through my December break that when you set out to do something, you had better get started on it. Procrastination is out of my vocabulary from now on.  I will be deleting several words off my word-list so that for me they will be in-existent. And come the end of the year, I will be making a complete list of all the words and phrases I ditched because they were not adding value to my life. It is not enough living a life of routines. We are worth more than that! If a human brain invented the computer which is one of the smartest inventions in the history of mankind, and computers can do a million different tasks, then why can’t we human beings do even more? That doesn’t mean that we should struggle to do the very things computers do. Live a life of facing new challenges and solving them, and have a reason to smile that you are obviously way better off than you PC even though it does a million tasks for you, which would make some of us prefer our screens as best friends to actual human friends.

I am currently a student at the University of Nairobi and therefore a lot of what I will write will be based on my experiences in school. But besides that, I will be writing about my project work and facing life as it is; getting to maximize opportunities while dealing with challenges. Today happens not to be one of those moments I want to give a complete list of what I want to do; I just know I will do it because I have the energy and ability and the zeal to do it.  If there is one year I would want to keep fresh in my head, it is definitely 2011 because in this one year of 12 months, I grew up in various dimensions, I learnt so much, I made many friends, I became a better listener and most importantly my thoughts were nurtured more than ever before. Now that partly explains why I say 2011 was an awesome year. How else would I have ever known what it feels like to be in an awkward position as you aspire to achieve your vision? There is this special lady who has been my mentor for 3 years now. When I shared with her about my heartbreak and feeling that I had totally lost my endeavors upon scoring bad grades at one time, she was not too quick to answer me. But when she did, she gave me words full of so much wisdom, I will always remember them, “There is a time for everything, don’t feel too low just because you didn’t meet your expectations. Everything has its own timing. Who knows, maybe you will live to be glad that it happened now and not later.” And today I totally agree to what she said.  We do come across situations that put us down, for some us we maintain low profiles and probably get our self-esteem hampered. There is a time for everything and for any set time for an event, there is a reason for it. I will share my own experience on “everything in life happens for a reason”.  This subject was supposed to be my first post on my 2011 blog that never was. I wrote so much about it that at one time I thought I should give more insight and do a book instead. However, I will still put a summary of it as a post since it was originally a blog post anyway.

I have put together different mind pieces here; it may not be possible to give a clear subject to what I am saying. This is day 1, with time it will get better and refined. Once in life I feared writing very long letters and thereafter mails. Because I believed no one would be anxious enough to read some long write –up that would probably get boring half-way, and for a recipient who gets easily distracted, he/she would give up reading what I had to say. This changed last year when I heard the chance to intern with the Global Give Back Circle. And my boss happened to be one of these people who can really write, lengthwise and content-wise. At one time we were doing general introductory mails to follow up on partnerships with our program. Blessed at writing than most of us, my boss would write the mails or letters and we would ensure communication occurs. There is one particular time she wrote such a long letter and my first thought was that no busy office fellow would take time to reach such a long document. Consequently, I gathered the courage to tell her that most people do not like long letters or mails; they simply scan through or maybe don’t even put their eyes on them. Deep down in me I knew I was among “the most people” who don’t like lengthy conversations and was making a general statement to exempt me from reading those long messages as well. I am not about to forget what my boss told me, she obviously got my fear of communication being ineffective but she was not about to start writing shorter conversations just because I thought people would ignore them. She told me it is never wrong to put down all you have to say as long as your flow of ideas is continuous and your work is impressive. And if there is one person I know who always reads keenly through documents presented to her, it is my boss. A trick of shoddy rushed work just to finish will not go unnoticed by her. She taught me to be patient when reading and understand what the other party has to say. The same patience is needed not only in reading but also in oral conversations. Try that, it works magic. What if you decide to be the person who will be patient to read/listen and understand? From reading several documents some requiring more keenness for corrections to be done, I have improved and heightened my passion for reading as well. I have also learnt to be a better listener. I once met a cheerful boy in my university who heard a passion in music, he would write simple songs and in a small group they released their first music audio. His major is Biology but he wants to do music more than anything else. In my society, you gotta be very daring to stand in front of your parents and tell them you want to pursue music and not Biology. As I was chatting with this musician-cum-biologist, he made me realize that my listening skills had improved! I had set out to be a better listener, but sometimes we never know whether we are achieving that goal we set out for especially when it involves others. The kind of listening I am referring to here should not be confused with listening in class; because I believe I am good listener in class otherwise I would never managed it through our education system. I am referring to taking your time to carefully listen to what people have to say as opposed to eagerly waiting for your turn to bombard questions or take center stage and be the speaker to be listened to.  Goals such as “striving to be a better listener” can be created from knowledge gained in materials shared by other people. Therefore, taking time to read materials by other people can get you a step further in defining yourself and setting out new horizons in life. 

Reading is an experience, try it and you will learn new things and when you try these new things then they become REAL EXPERIENCES worth sharing.