Another day, another fresh start

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931), Museum of Modern Art (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Consistency has never been my strongest suit. "You can say that again." says anyone who knows me, reads this, and is into cliches. "There's an accent over the e, in cliché" says anyone who reads this and is into nitpicking. "Will you please get on with it," says anyone who reads this, and wonders, out loud, when, if ever, I will get to the point.

"Alright," I say, deftly switching from narrative to dialog. "The point is that I've developed persistence to compensate for my consistent inconsistency. If you can't be consistent, be persistent, I always say." Or I will always say, now that I've thought of it.

I wasn't born persistent. As a kid I was wishy-washy. But one day, in my mid-thirties, I read this: "As long as you haven't quit, you haven't failed." I had high standards (and sometimes low ones) which I often failed to meet. When I fell short of any of my many standards I felt the sting, and sometimes the agony of my failure. What I read gave me a way out. It told me how I could deliver myself from at least some of that pain. All I had to do was to quit quitting.

So I made a decision. Anyone who has read my as yet unpublished book Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dumies, knows that decision is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. And decision didn't let me down. I decided that I wasn't going to give up. Ever.  And I haven't.

From the outside, I am sure it's seemed like I've given up occasionally. It's even seemed that way from the inside, a time or two. But don't let appearances fool you. Or me. I don't give up. I may get distracted; I may temporarily suspend my efforts; I may even retreat, tactically, of course. But I don't give up. I persist. And sometimes, I start over.

January 28th is the data of my last post. Today it's February 11th. My plan was to write a post a day. Yesterday it might have seen that I'd failed to do that. But I haven't. Because I haven't given up.

Today's post is a fresh start. The post is a fact, the result of writing it. That it is a fresh start is a meaning, the result of a decision. It's a fresh start because I've decided it is. And that's enough.

I haven't yet decided whether that my fresh start means that I am going to post every day, starting today, or whether it means I am going to fill in the gaps so that I will have, on the average, posted every day, starting the day when I decided to post every day. And I don't have to decide, right now, or ever.

It's one or the other.

In the meantime. Welcome to my fresh start.