It started innocently enough a little more than a year ago. While I was learning to fly I began reading flying blogs, anything that someone wrote about their learning to fly experiences. I started off with reading author, pilot and flight instructor Greg Brown’s blog, The Flying Carpet. He guided me through learning to fly with his posts on flying. He connected me with other older pilots who I could relate to in my learning to fly experiences. Up to that time I had heard about blogging but didn’t really know what it was.
For months I continued to read Greg’s blog and student pilot blogs. I found myself searching for more life experiences from other student pilots and spending more and more time on-line. I can’t seem to pin point the exact moment I decided to start a blog but sometime not long before my first post on January 8, 2010 I happened on to the WordPress.com site and it talked about how easy it was to start a blog.
I’m not that tech savvy so I took it slow and played with the blog idea and themes. I choose the name FlyingGma for two reasons: both are because of defining moments in my life. The first part was my pursuit of learning to fly at age 48 and the second part was for my new role as grandma in August of 2009. I really didn’t know where I was going with the blog when I started other than to learn something new.
I started to read other blogs on WordPress.com by way of “Freshly Pressed”. The seduction began when I started seeing the featured blogs on the front page of WordPress.com. Seeing my blog featured on Freshly Pressed became my goal.
I read many of the Freshly Pressed blogs to see what they were doing that made them unique and ultimately chosen for the Freshly Pressed feature. I started subscribing to various blogs that I found interesting on Freshly Pressed. Up until this point no one had ever commented on anything I had written except for two dear friends that I shared the fact that I have a blog.
Just as Satan seduced Eve with an apple the statistics seduced me. WordPress definitely knows what they are doing when they say they have stats to obsess over. It’s true. When my blog started to be read regularly by others and they left a comment those numbers became more important. I began to check the stats more than once each day. I definitely liked to see the numbers improve or special comments left about what I had written.
Next I read a blog about someone who worried about the subscriber that they had lost and wondered why. I didn’t realize up to this point that I could subscribe to a blog or have subscribers. I was still learning about WordPress and blogging. I began subscribing to other blogs that I enjoyed reading and adding links from my blog to their blogs. The statistics just kept getting better. Somehow in my mind I equated better statistics with better writing, which was far from the truth. My writing has improved by practicing daily but it still has a long way to go.
I have observed bloggers remove posts from their sites because no one commented on their post or perhaps didn’t even visit a blog on a day. At first it bothered me that what I wrote wasn’t read or people didn’t visit my blog because of the topic I chose to write about that day. Then I thought just maybe the reason they didn’t read could have been they have a life outside of blogging and were spending time doing something else that day. Maybe they were doing something special with their family, which would be a better thing than reading my blog. Good for them!
I haven’t blogged for almost a week thinking about the seduction/obsession that blogging has become in my life. What was I giving up in the amount of time I spent preparing my blog and photos? Time with my husband, family and other things that I enjoy like reading, quilting, baking and of course sleep.
There will be more balance in my life from here on out. I will continue to blog but probably not as often. Time is a commodity, which means there is not an endless supply of it. Using time wisely is my new obsession not wanting to squander even a minute of the precious gift it is.
Flying Gma's Blog 