The act of writing for myself and only for myself is significantly different from the act of writing with the knowledge that others will read what I write.

The act of writing for others shifts the expectations that I have for myself and causes me, in many ways, to observe and interact with the world with the goal of being able to synthesize and reflect back what I experience.

While I would always do a fair amount of that for myself regardless of who I’m writing for, when I write for others, that reflection becomes the focus.

It brings up the question of how experiencing life is different when you don’t have the immediate task in front of you of finding lessons in your experiences and distilling them down for a blog post or a talk.

With a big life moment on the horizon, now feels like a good time for me to give that a try.

For the next couple of months, I’m going to see what happens when I put my creative expectations aside and sit in the space of just absorbing the world for awhile…