For the entire month of June I’ve been writing a series of blog-a-day posts based on a set series of open-ended questions to myself. This is the LAST of those posts. It’s done! Huzzah! We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming… until next June.

June 30th // Something You Want To Share

We always seem to be trying to teach kids to share. It’s a mantra: Share! Why aren’t you sharing? You need to share! SHARE! And if they don’t share? Then we force them to share until they remember who is in charge.

But then when we unavoidably turn into adults, sharing becomes almost like a bad word (unless it refers to cookies or other tasty carbohydrates) with all sorts of (yes) good but also bad connotations: Sharing is for hippies. Sharing is dog-eared library books covered in someone else’s grubby finger goops. Sharing is taxes and quasi-socialism. Sharing is what electronic pirates do with music and movie files. Sharing is giving away trade secrets and breaching non-disclosure agreements. Sharing is risk and putting a piece of yourself out into the world for everyone to trounce and pounce and judge. Sharing is letting someone else have what you’ve worked for.

Or… how cynical am I?

I’ve just spent the last twenty-nine days (plus today) writing this series of 29 (plus one) blog-a-day posts, presumably because I feel inclined to share…. what? Something. In fact, over the course of this month, I’ve gradually — the same sort of way I inched into the cold ocean water when swimming on vacation, letting a little more of the cool shock splash up on me with each tenuous step — re-opened this blog to public consumption. I’ve ever-so-gradually added little tweaks, changes, enhancements, plugins, code, and all that, here and there that make it easier and easier to find. I’ve dipped back into the sharing realm. I’ve reloaded (or so the new title would have you believe) even though said sharing wasn’t necessarily in the plan at the outset back on June first. But this blog is now effective and unabashedly shared.

And that was something of a sticky point way back in early May when I first started poking at this blog again, the bulk of it still hidden behind the twisted labyrinth of secret domains, layered passwords, and search-engine-blocking code. Sharing was something I was wanting to do, but not exactly remembering how. Sticky. Sticky because sharing is all those things I listed above, but also a bunch of good things too: Sharing is words and thoughts and memories building a collective history with each other. Sharing is photographs spreading pictures of my life and fun and family around the internets to make friends and other family happy. Sharing is a grain of an idea spawning new ideas spawning new ideas spawning new ideas spawning new ideas, ad infinitum, until we all know something better and deeper than we did before. Sharing is letting someone else have what you’ve worked for.

Chances are you haven’t gone back to any old posts to figure out why this blog mysteriously reappeared here again. And chances are you are rolling your eyes while you read this because you are sitting at your desk scrolling through this text and thinking, “oh shit, here he goes again…” And chances are you don’t even care.

But I’ve got a much better sense of something I want to share now. I’ve thought about it. A lot. Probably I’ve thought about it too much. But there it is. Share… and enjoy.

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