There’s a rhythm to this site, although I’m not sure it’s something that anyone but me would notice. There are things I try to post at set times, or in “slots” that make sense to me but were never planned that way. To wit, this should be another collection of THR newsletter graphics. Except there aren’t any to post.
Okay, that’s not entirely true; I could, in theory, post the last couple of weeks’ images, but then I run into another internal rhythm problem — I’d eat up the buffer of time between the images running in the newsletter and my posting them here. For some reason, that two-to-three week gap is important to me, although I couldn’t explain why properly.
What happened was that the newsletter paused for the holidays. We took two weeks off, which felt great at the time, but created a window here where there wouldn’t be a graphics post as usual. On the one hand, that’s not a big deal — I’ve been doing the 2020 Vision posts daily and posting photos from Brazil, so the site’s been image heavy as is, at least compared with before. But on the other hand…!
I’m a creature of habit. I wish that I wasn’t, and I can be very good in situations where improvisation is necessary, surprising even myself, but… I like knowing how things are, and not worrying about potential surprises or complications around the corner. So, not having a newsletter graphics post was something that genuinely weighed on me for days as I approached today. What was I going to do? What could I do? Should I ignore it? Post graphics and eat up the buffer? Write a long, self-indulgent post about the whole thing?
At the heart of it, ultimately, is how important and necessary routine and rhythm has become for me here. Knowing that I should post a particular thing on a particular day — even though no-one’s reading, even though it’s all self-imposed rules and barriers — makes it easier for me to keep doing this, somehow. It’s the difference between swimming an ocean or doing laps at a pool: if I know that I have newsletter graphics every two weeks, then I know how long each lap is in between, to torture the metaphor. That counts, for me.
So: no newsletter graphics, even though they “should” go here. No-one regrets that more than me.