Chris Jericho told me it was time to blog again

Welcome back.

It's nice to be out of my self-imposed three-month blogging exile.

I never meant to be away this long.

December got busy with Christmas shopping, and by the endless array of holiday social gatherings and all the usual things. Then the first few weeks of January was spent recovering from December and compensating for all the life obligations that got shunned over Christmas. By late January, I wanted to blog again, but it had been too long to come back with just a routine observation or two complaining about my newest co-worker or a puzzling bumper sticker I saw. I had to come back with something big. But inspiration escaped me. I felt under-equipped to do something big, so I did nothing at all.

Such is life. Our dreams disappear slowly through steady, incremental neglect. If the things we want can't be immediately achieved, we often just try to forget we ever wanted them instead of moving labouriously in their direction. The story of why I stopped blogging is the story of why many of our dreams don't come true. But it's not the story in which I want to live.

I read a lot over the break. In between volumnes of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, I picked up what I expected to be a mindless guilty pleasure: the auto-biography of pro-wrestler/rock star/game show host/VH1 pop-culture commentator Chris Jericho. He's always amused me, and I was in need of something light to bridge me to the next series of Tolkein's epic battles. But in reading the backstory of how a skinny kid from a broken home in rural Canada became famous, it struck me not just how hard he worked, but his sense of joy while doing it, even through the awful parts. The hard work was worth it, because the goal, whether attained or not, was the purpose he envisioned for his life.

His tale reminded me that most dreams only come true through hard work. And if I settle for a comfortable but unfulfilling life doing something else, work will always feel like work. My current job pays the bills. It may continue to do so until the day I pass from this world. But it isn't my purpose. So while I continue to do what I have to in order to meet life's obligations, joy comes in working toward a bigger dream.

My ship will never come in if I don't bother to build a pier.

I'll see you soon. Very, very soon.