I was totally shocked the other day when I came across an old blog post of mine on a search engine. I first asked myself, “Did I really write that?” and then even, “Did I actually post that? on the internet… for people to actually read?” One aspect of blogging that has never occurred to me is the capability to track changes in perspective. Now there are two obvious sides to this: one being that an individual’s perspective genuinely changes and the other being that the individual’s filter changes for what content to post and not to post. We will stick to the former for now.
When I first saw the old blog post, I immediately wanted to delete it. I wanted to get rid of it and erase it from memory. Then I starting thinking about all of the possible people that may have read it. To be open, it has been deleted… along with several more posts.
I believe my perspective has changed… which is understandably a desirable aim. It has changed about life… about purpose… about all types of things.
Why was I so quick to want to delete the old posts? The old posts were records of perspective in time that served as proof of viewpoint changes… I would suggest “good” viewpoint changes.
There is an interesting relationship between making progress and showing progress. The idea can be used with photography: if a photo is taken and is considered “bad” then another one is taken; if the second is considered “bad” then another one is taken; and if the third one is finally “good” then you can kiss the others goodbye. But now the value of the “good” photo instantly decreases because of the lack of proof for the work to get there, the duds that had to be thrown out.
I have said all of this to say that I hope to make progress, whatever that may be, in the future, but maybe next time I shouldn’t be so quick to toss those “bad” photos just as fast as I took them.
