At the start of my writing routine the very first thing that happens is that I put the date at the top of the document. That happens within most mediums that I have used to produce content. Probably the part of that routine that still creates the most reflection on my part is the tick of the year at the start of that YYYY-MM-DD to be used explicitly as YYYYMMDD. Other date formats exist, but are never going to work for me as well as that cherished time based identifier. Within that routine the first little bit is the part that really gets to me during the start of the writing process. I have reached the point in my lifecycle where I look at the year and think how we got so far from 1999 on the timeline. For some reason the anchor point in how I put a context to the timeline is squarely placed on 1999 and the change over to the year 2000. Apparently, that is how I start to unpack the context of how I relate to bringing my experience inline with the now. 

All of that consideration in the last paragraph showed up today as I pondered if it really was 2023 and how we managed to get all the way to that point in the timeline. Without question the simple act of sitting down and typing on this keyboard does not require any particular year or date. In general, I could complete that action without knowing the current date. The two things don’t have to be related in any way shape or form. It would be pretty hard within modern society to give up using the calendar. Even if I was devoted to dropping that construct from my routine it would show back up pretty quickly throughout the day as people made plans and shared upcoming events. I’m not planning to even try to give up on grounding my days in the context of what day it happens to be. I am still thinking about how 2023 showed up and it’s here. 

This will be the third day in a row of posting some content to the blog. I’m sure WordPress will send me a note about being on a streak of some sort. My writing pattern used to be really consistent within the pattern of creating a stream of consciousness based pose during the week and really spending my weekend time working on more academic style writing. That type of writing pattern was really about focusing my thoughts via the act of writing for a block of time and trying to really bring my attention and focus into the thing that needed the most support in terms of time and energy. Part of that is about recognizing that we only have so much time and energy to spend and I want to focus it on the right things.