It flew by me. Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the first post on The Opportunity Machine.
I thought I’d have run out of things to say by now. But it turns out that if you keep living, you keep finding new things to think about.
I’ve done an awful lot of playing and experimenting here. I’ve trialed weekly or monthly features, some of which stuck around for a while, others only happened once, and some are still going. I’ve played around with how I’ve presented my ideas as much as with what ideas I’ve presented.
I’ve had neat milestones, too. The first “fan” I had. The first time I learned that someone had shared one of my posts with her peers of her own volition. The first time (recently!) that someone wrote about this blog. I’ve enjoyed all that very much.
Here’s the huge value-add for me though: since I’ve been writing a daily blog now for two years, that means I’ve written over seven hundred entries. Gun to my head I probably couldn’t name more than 30 from memory. That means that this blog has magnified the power of my memory by more than twentyfold. Thoughts I’ve had that would otherwise have vanished into thin air are now preserved in some way, to be built upon and reviewed and perhaps even disagreed with by a future version of me. But they mean something in a way that a thought you don’t remember doesn’t.
Both of my grandfathers lived incredibly interesting lives, but both died many years ago – my maternal grandfather when I was only 7, and my paternal grandfather before I was even born. They have great stories, but I’ve only ever gotten to hear them second-hand. Snippets and collections of lives that I would have loved to experience more.
I have three children, and I also have a pretty interesting life. It’s not wild to presume that one day I may have grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, and so on – and that they may one day want to know more about how I thought, how I lived, what was important in my life. Perhaps to view their own parents through eyes that saw them as children, or to trace back the origins of whatever values I ultimately pass down to them.
Maybe it will just be me, many years hence, who wants to look back through the eyes of a younger man in a different world and look at the same point in time from both directions.
This blog is part self-help advice column, part chronicle of strange adventures, part campfire stories and part amateur psychology course. It’s more, too – much more.
What it isn’t though – is ending.
See you tomorrow.
The Opportunity Machine 