#BlogIntroChallenge 1: What made you start blogging?

The lovely and ever inventive and creative Guylty has issued a new blog challenge. It is all a journey of introspection via the above question path. I’ll take this slowly, as seems to be my pace round here, but time is impossibly limited so at least i can start with nr 1.

I had this half written and ironically in the page i had written i was saying how much more i enjoy my new blog home compared to the old…. when i clicked by mistake and the whole thing was gone! Why is there no auto-save on WP???

Unfortunately i now have to cut the story short 😦

What i was saying is that this blog is not really new, i have been at it for a surprising – to me – number of years just changed street address so to speak. Meet me… back in 2008…  Opera is Magic!

The impulse back then was the same as when i pushed myself to get back at it: real life experiences which were both enriching and life changing. I’ve been going to live performances of music and theatre since the age of 3 when i parents first took me to see an opera. It has always been part of my life, but it was growing and changing myself and circumstances around me that led to a more conscious enjoyment of it. I moved countries and had to travel a lot for work so could only see a lot less. I learned to live without the frequency of events, experienced other hobbies and discovered the internet at some point as a means of keeping in touch with the artistic world.

I also realised that what for me has always been a source of joy and excitement did not mean overall positive reactions. In seems at least in classical music the more people know and have experienced, the more they enjoy criticising and debating. So i wanted to keep that feeling of excitement for longer  but also convey it to others, among which many of my friends who had not experienced it before or to a much lesser degree. Which is sort of why my first post was in Spanish although i am not a native speaker, to share with friends. I switched to English immediately after as the interactions outside the net suggested other people may want to read too.

I got enormous joy out of writing and sharing the experience and the travel time in hotels allowed me to keep it alive for a good number of years. When work pattern changed it became more difficult also because some of the people i shared the experience in writing crossed over in real life and i was having the face to face conversation that i used to have in writing before. 2012 has been a year of artistic high points and big accumulation in real life of events, i lost the energy to repeat what i spent tens of hours talking about. And the two years that follow lack any high points that came close to those. Nothing quite reached the level of excitement that i had experienced before ( and other rl concerns emerged as well).

As you can see i couldn’t bring myself to close it completely, not even to make it private, i loved writing it. So i kept it and i routinely played around with the idea of continuing. I created the empty shell of my current house more than a year before i actually started writing again..

And then came 2014 🙂 with a life changing summer you have heard much about by now 😉 And i felt inspired, challenged, enriched again.The inspiration came from where i did  not expect it and it is very different to write about something that is so much less familiar to me. And i felt it has also given me the permission to write about other topics too. And inspiration and joy has come not only from the impulse originator, but also from making new friends, interacting with people, finding new ideas, exchanging thoughts. I like the fun times as much as i do the pensative times. Thanks for bringing me back and for allowing me to feel completely at home in the blink of an eye 🙂 And the latter is fully due to the interaction with you fellow bloggers and commentators 🙂