rebirth

I spent the afternoon updating my blog layout. The redesign was completely unplanned, but rather fortuitous as I'm quite pleased with the outcome. Not that I'm committing myself to more blogging by any means, but it does feel like a place I don't mind investing time in anymore.

A good amount of effort was spent adding graphics and better tagging to all my old posts to create a more cohesive brand: Namely the Play/Pause theme. Ever since the beginning of 2013 I've been intrigued by the concept of life in play and pause states and I've been looking for a better way to incorporate this into my blogs. After learning about Scrum last year, I became a big believer of retrospective/reflection posts, but more recently with Kanban, I've also come to grasp the utility in visualizing your future as well. For the record, goals have never been absent from my life, but my understanding about how they worked in conjunction to my happiness became clearer after last year's readings.

So even though this may be obvious, I want to explain how I plan to use  the play and pause tags in my future posts.

PLAY 
Play is forward. It's focus - sometimes refocus - on who I want to become and what I need to do in order to be that person. Contrary to its definition, Play is not usually fun. In fact, it's full of fear about the unknown and risks in the uncomfortable, skin stretching experiences I hate so that I may grow closer to the examples set by the people who inspire, love, and motivate me. Play posts plant the seed for meaningful things I want to happen in my life.

PAUSE
Pause is reflection. It's learning - sometimes relearning and assessment - on situations passed. The majority of my previous Pause posts have been about music, but that isn't primarily going to be the case going forward. Pause is equally about experiencing gratitude and appreciating the moment, as it is about observing and learning from the past.

These states are not mutually exclusive, and as I've indicated earlier, actually feed off of one another quite symbiotically. I think having these tags will remind me to have engaged, meaningful experiences that I instigate, rather than living life passively. Let's just hope I don't go overboard with a giant music player metaphor (cause you know I've already thought about it)...