Looking back, Falling forward

By any far-fetched chance of probabilistic imagination, have you wondered why my blog is named Reminiscence? If not then I am sure you have better things to do. Anyways, there are a handful of people who do not and hence I go forth pandering to their curiosities and resulting queries.

When I started the blog, I had intended it to be a sort of a public diary where I could share experiences that triggered an oasis of contemplation in an otherwise not so green field of thought. Under normal circumstances such thoughts would have gone in a condensed form into the folds of my closest confidant, my personal diary. Then one fine day, a narcissist alter ego inside me convinced me to share some of the less embarrassing thoughts with those willing to read these pages.

However, over the years the character and basic feel of the blog has changed. If you clear the cobwebs a bit and look into my older posts and compare them with newer posts, you might find that the former have a more philosophical tone. As time passed, I realised that my (AWESOME) sense of humour seemed to amuse my readers more than my ramblings on the mundane fact that I forgot to brush my teeth one morning and my philosophical interpretations of the disastrous consequences.

Over the years I have stopped trying hard to create that (fake) hue of philosophy on my blog and the blog began to take a comic shade closer in character to the nutty author. See the tags on this blog and their frequency. Yes, the name of the blog is misleading and I have wanted to change it many times. Apparently I can change the name of the blog whenever I fancy but I cannot change its web address. I felt it would be a bit awkward to have a pseudo-intellectual link name like “reminiscentarrows.blogspot.com” and have a blog name that is neither related to Reminiscence nor Arrows. My plans of shifting to a new blog have been put on the backburner courtesy my not so strong technical skills and quite so strong procrastination skills.

I digress a lot today. Coming to the core of the bottom of the point I wanted to make in this post. As the new year dawns and the old year dusks I Reminisce about the one resolution I have managed to uphold over the years. The practise of writing a personal diary. It’s been over a decade since I started this habit.

At the end of every year, I take time off to look at the pages of the past year. I summarise the year in a couple of pages. More often than not I end up flipping the pages of years further back. It’s a wonderful feeling. Looking back at how the thought process (and writing style) has evolved is a soulful experience. The way priorities have changed over the years. The dreams, desires, wishes, whims and fantasies (even the crushes). The pleasure of rubbing off the dust of the years (literally and metaphorically) and flipping through yellow but crisp pages makes it worth expending the miniscule effort of writing every night at the end of the day.

Common sense would tell that there should be a lesson to be learnt by revising the mistakes of the past. But over the years, I have seen myself make a couple of mistakes with some similarities. Despite having written about it in the past years. Yet again, every year I look back and wonder what it will be like going forward. How to describe this apparent incongruence? How about the title of this post?