“I don’t know if this will be a ‘daily vlog’ or a ‘daily vlog except when it isn’t'”
“I don’t know what I’m talking about”
Classic Davis Vlogging
Something something, whatever it takes to get me working out loud again.
The convention will be that the date on these will be the day they get published, but they may contain footage shot at any time in the past, present or even the future. I think.
It’s my blogiversary. Here’s where it all started in September 2004…
Some thoughts now on my thoughts then:
“The world really has changed” – I obviously thought this needed saying. Who was I trying to convince? Will there ever be a time when this isn’t true?
“I am connected to a very diverse network of people” – I had no idea how much this would grow. Especially when Twitter came along.
“a traditional CV doesn’t give the flavour of real me” – still true. I spent another hour with someone the other day who wanted to understand “what it is that you do?” These days I’m much more light-hearted about it and worry less about being misunderstood.
“a blog is a perfect personal knowledge management tool” – this was marketing, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still true. I wish I used it more.
“It’s OK to turn up late to the party” – I really thought I’d missed the boat. Again, I had no idea what was just around the corner.
It does feel like the same sort of need is here again, for us to take responsibility for making our own media and building our own online relationships, instead of delegating it to the new corporations that have appeared in the last 20 years. I got close to taking August off again this year and we’re off to some woods for a week, but I’ve got some ideas for how I want to take this thing into it’s third decade. Thanks for sticking around x
So, I woke up thinking about practice. Just choosing to do a something, over and over again. Like, this morning, at 7 a.m., the kettle’s boiling, and there I am, setting up my camera, pressing the red record button and talking to myself in the kitchen like any other ordinary person in the 21st Century. But seriously, I like making this stuff and regardless of how it turns out, it’s a bit of practice I didn’t do yesterday.
And then I’m also thinking about acceptance, particularly in the process of making stuff. Like, nothing is ever totally right the first time, which I’ve been banging on about forever, but still find it hard to accept. I don’t want to draft stuff and then polish. Just. Don’t. Want. I want authenticity and I revert to believing it has to mean nailing everything in one go or giving up completely. Often, things just come out in the wrong order. They’re in some sort of right order in my head, but that’s a sub-optimal order for telling a story. Editing and switching stuff around isn’t just okay, it’s essential and I’ve had to cultivate my acceptance of that too. And since the camera never lies, I’ve had to accept that I now look like I’m 100 years old.
But acceptance is something that literally “comes with practice”. I have to keep doing the thing—setting up the camera, pressing record, and then gradually coming to ignore my tummy, or the dumb things I say or the number of times I touch my face. And that’s the part I didn’t fully understand until I talked it all through. I knew that practice was important and that acceptance mattered, but I hadn’t realised that practice is what actually leads to acceptance.
That’s what I wanted to say. But it’s not how it came out the first time. I had to write it down and think it through and turn it around. You see, I’m trying to get back in the habit of shooting video of myself and when I came to seeing if I could edit this morning’s ramble into something intelligible I realised I hadn’t noticed how much I’d been touching my face. So I made the video into just a montage of that instead.
Perfect Path 