The Philosophy of Blogging

Everyday (at least during the no-class days), my mom always tells me to get up early and clean the lawn. I don't know if you will find it ridiculous, but let's say that my mother has a knack for making me do household work with the least 'grr!' as possible simply because it has been a routine. A routine which she believes is for my own good, a routine which essentially helps me grow, a routine which, well, forces me to get up early.

So I was cleaning the lawn. And truth be told, the lawn really looks more of a graden than a stream of flowing grass. We have a good electric fountain which reuses the water poured into it, garden stones, and a set of good plants. Our garden may not be comparable to the ones in Buckingham Palace, but rest assured that it's a grove of its own. Whenever I walk outside the house, the garden soothes me as if it was massaging my tired eyes from all the work I've been doing as of late.

So yeah, I was cleaning the lawn. While I was sweeping away the dead leaves falling from the balete tree, I remember how my mom used to attend to the garden herself. She would tirelessly water the plants and treat it like a human being. Although she confesses to not having a green thumb, her watering skills at least do the talking. Eventually, she had to hire a professional gardener because admittedly I cannot do the perfect garden she wants to attain.

It dawned on me then, that maintaining a blog is very much like gardening. You pick up plants from the flower shop and place it in the garden because you want the garden to be very beautiful. Maintaining a garden is very much dependent on your caring. If you're the type of gardener that just sweeps and waters the plants for the heck of it, your plants won't grow. Worse, it will die. Blogging requires that you be patient in everything that you do, you start off with a clean space begging for you to brighten it up. Successful bloggers create their content every single time, and they didn't arrive at their present design in a flick of a finger. The best bloggers in the world created their content in a way that would be pleasing to themselves, more than anything else. Because before you can start pleasing others, I think you have to know how to please yourself (in ways only you can communicate).

So I asked my mom, "Do you keep a garden because you want others to like it?"

She said yes.

"Is that the sole reason why you maintain that garden?"

She said no. Because what she wanted is to wake up in the morning to the tune of chirping birds in a little garden she made, of beautiful flowers and light scenery.

And that's nothing far from blogging.

Far too often, the successful bloggers of our time pride themselves with people coming in and out of their site. Internet traffic is such a considerable topic of conversation since it concerns viewership. Viewership is the main bone of contention in Internet blogging; because in the real world, your blog is as good as dead without any visitors. But whatever the reason or motivation is, the desire to have audience still remains in a blog even if the things in there are pleasing, if not scathing. Blogs were meant for self-expression, an assertion of personal space, so it must follow that I have the right to create my site the way I want it. And I guess that's an inviolable right.

That's why it pains me when other people say, "You shouldn't have written about it in your blog because you know, it's public." It's like you can't be yourself in your own personal space because other people are looking. The reality of the blogosphere is that even if you are allowed the right to your own domain, the mere fact of people coming in and out is something to be wary of. Everyone is entitled to freedom of expression, and for sure we all know that this freedom is not absolute.

So it's actually a scary world out there.

The scare, however, should not disarm us in being true to ourselves. The essence of blogging is in its simplicity and faithfulness to your daily living. It's not about being one with the audience most of the time; it's all about being you and being comfortable with the content you share online. And just like maintaining a garden, you are free to turn it into something appealing and appaling.

After all, the one who will view the garden is not your neighbor. It's you.