An Impulse to blog helps keep me going

We all need something to keep us out of mischief or we might end up doing some some sort of... mischief.  At one time work and parenthood provided something.  I have been retired for close to 6 years and my children are pretty much on their own.  Now more than ever, I am looking for some purpose to keep me focused on good things.  I have found two volunteer activities:  tutoring English and campaigning for electoral reform.  Blogging is fun and purposeful.

Some 15 years ago my daughter, Heather enabled me to start blogging.  Put the idea in my head and set it up.  

Of course vanity plays a role.  Who doesn't think they know better?  As I age perhaps a bigger concern is a fading memory.  I like to think I have lots of good things worth remembering.

A scary thought is the longer one lives, the more chance for getting dementia.  The advice I have read from the likes of Daniel Pink and Sanjay Gupta  tells me you must use your brain to keep it in good shape.  I am conscious that my memory is not as sharp as it once was and blogging helps me retain some of my memories.

What gives me a sense of purpose are some self assigned missions.   I react to the news, but often miss the urgency of the moment or somebody has already expressed my thoughts.  I read a lot and some excellent books spur my thinking and allows me to sort out my ideas and recommend the book for others to read in more depth.  Politics are said to bore many, but EVERYONE is effected.  Some youngsters look at the world either to enjoy as much as possible ignoring the confused messages.  Others see what a mess the world is in with hatred, greed, ignorance and despair.  And I guess most of us are in the middle. Psychology, sociology and philosophy explain much of life and are intertwined with politics.  

Politics admittedly takes up much of my thinking. Trump has made himself the centre of attention and I don't know what I'll do after he is gone.  I think climate change needs to be a greater priority.  We are not finished with pandemics.  Our electoral system is part of the overall need to sort out our priorities.  The rest of the world fascinates me, too often with bad things, but they do offer us a wide variety of perspectives.  Even if someone in a remote part of the world doesn't enjoy the level of freedom that I do, it is a concern.

More than books I watch a lot of movies, enjoyed some of them enough to want to recommend.   However marketing forces spend a lot of money promoting English speaking films so they don't need my help although some do hit me favorably.  What I think needs promoting are foreign films with subtitles or dubbing.  Many of them offer a perspective often missing in my part of the world.  At the same time they have developed expertise  One factor that should interest Anglophone viewers is that foreigners do different things some of which you might end of adopting.  The other, more important factor is that they are not all that different and are as human as we are.

I am constantly looking for subjects and how to present them,  There are far more subjects than I have time and energy for.   Deciding which ones suit me is done by ooking for connections and picking the right time.  Almost every day I do writing, researching, proofing and of course seeking new subjects and it keeps me out of most mischief..

My overall message