Perpetual Stroll

While eating dinner with Cliff earlier this week, I mused aloud that maybe losing the last 4 years of my blog wasn't such a bad thing. It would mean that future employers wouldn't be able to read through my archives and fire me for one reason or another. Cliff looked at me and responded, "Yeah, but it's not like you want to work for anyone anyway." True.

In the last week of August, I spent the days riding my bike through the Maritimes and the nights trying to get the server back up and running. It's hard to articulate the feelings that arose after losing everything. At first, I was in shock, then anger set in, then sadness and eventually, acceptance. Yes, I grieved for my blog. After all, there were tens of thousands of words that chronicled some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life since 2002. However, thanks to Google's cache, I have been able to recover all the monthly archives of my public blog. There are countless files and pictures that are gone forever, but at the very least, I have the writing. Unfortunately, it would take far too much time to retrieve the individual entries with all the comments and I've had to concede that I will have to let those go.

But Google didn't index everything. I think what has upset me the most is the loss of a relationship blog that captured many of the magical moments of when Jenny and I first started dating. Moments of soft candlelight and drifting snowflakes. Tender kisses. Soft caresses. I spent many long hours on those entries trying to craft the words to perfectly describe those moments. But there are always the memories, and there is always the future.

So while in Prince Edward Island, I asked myself, do I continue blogging? Or do I move in a different direction? And after a lot of thought, I've decided to keep on going. Every time I ask myself, "why blog?", the answer has always been some variation of a desire to share my life story, hoping that parts of it may resonate with others.

But a question still remained, do I put the archives back up? This was an opportunity to make a clean break from the past. Or to even clean up the past. I considered extracting all the painful and ugly parts from the archives, but many of the stories are tightly woven into the others and for me, it was all or nothing. I picked all. Why? Because when the blog went down, I received several emails from visitors who I had never heard from before. There were some who had silently read the blog over the years and others were new and took the time to read through the last 4 years of archives. They had never made contact before this, but I'm glad they did, because they reminded me that blogging is a great way to connect with others, whether you know it or not.

Through happiness, sorrow, laughter, pain and joy, I share my story here.