It’s as easy as it looks.

Two years. That’s a nontrivial amount of time to go without having officially “blogged”. I've done other things, mind you. Blogging just hasn’t been one of those things.

I’m sure we can all say the same, even given the fact that this past year feels like two all on its own.

I’ve developed a habit over the nearly year I’ve been working from home for someone who pays me to be creative. Every morning, I send a status update email to people whose responsibility it is to keep track of everyday goings on. Nothing major, just a quick note to outline my daily tasks. For some reason that is lost to me today, I closed that first email with a little blurb that began “did you know. . .”. I thought it would keep the email interesting. I figured that, if quarantine lasted a few months, it would be easy to just add that little blurb and we’ll all have learned a few interesting, quirky facts.

Forty or sixty easy little facts wouldn’t be too difficult to keep up with, right?

Ten and one-half months later, I’m still adding them. It’s become a habit. I cannot go a single day without adding a “did you know. . .” as the coda to a status email. Even on the weekends, I consider what obscure factoids to include the following week. I try to keep to a theme each week. Fashion, travel, technology, animals. . .

Did you know thousands of new trees are planted each year because of squirrels forgetting where they buried their acorns?

It has become habit. Ceased to be work at all. It’s something that I do every morning when logging into work. Here’s the status, here’s a fact. This has reinforced the idea that once you’ve formed any habit, doing it becomes as easy as walking. Daily morning pages has also helped illustrate this for me, but more on that at a later date.

No matter how many times I learn that lesson, it always startles me with how true it is. Do a thing frequently enough and it becomes the thing you do.

Now, on the resurrection of the blog, all I can say is that I’ll try. It’s not quite a habit yet, but making it one should be pretty easy. Just gotta do it more than once every two years.