Getting Started. That’s the trick. Where do you begin?
You have dreams, ambitions. Sometimes your dreams are lofty, change the world kinds of dreams. Other times, the dream search can be as simple as a new job to better provide for your family or overcoming an unforeseen life obstacle.
I am not sure to what end I am starting this site other than I see it as a means to better be myself.
I love technology. I love art, teaching, photography. I love writing. Audio. Video. Being a Parent.
No single medium encompasses all of these things, allows for these things more strongly than the web site.
The web site also neatly encapsulates many of the things I think defines me as a member of society.
I’m a systems/applications architect and development team lead. I build or help build systems that others can use. I help design and build the tools and components my team uses to build and design solutions for others.
I use web sites to communicate with friends and family and express to them that which means the. most to me, being a father and husband.
And in the past, as along with my wife, a founding member of The Cynic Online Magazine , I used the web to help authors, artists poets and humorists chase the dream of publication by helping to provide for nearly a decade a place for aspiring creators to use as a launch point to chase their own dreams of notoriety and publication.
But over time I realized I have never really used the Internet for me, as an expression of me. Why?
Fear of failure? Fear of success? Introversion? Fear of letting others down, letting myself down?
Truthfully, I am not sure although the true composition of the human existence lies in the aggregation of multiple truths, not gray areas or absolutes but a combination of absolutes working conjunctively to create those fuzzy elements of confusion we call hesitation. Why we let those experiences, notions, judgements handed down by ourselves or others affect us so greatly, we can only through great introspection judge for ourselves – the blame for not moving forward, for those that choose not to move forward, is each of ours alone.
Granted, circumstances may not be ideal for personal growth. Some people will have an easier go at moving forward; others will have a much more difficult if nigh impossible time. For me, the culmination of my life experiences led me to create this site, these pages. Getting started was the hard part. As an architect and someone who built a publication from scratch, my inclination would be to build this site from scratch. But WordPress has been around awhile and while I’m not ruling out writing a publication engine again, building such an engine would not be representative of the whole me. So after months of deliberation, scheming, developing libraries, sites, selecting and evaluating technologies, designing graphics, I realized that the true start of my journey lie in allowing myself the ability to express myself on multiple fronts. WordPress is geared for that. And although I used a template, that does not mean I won’t get to at some point provide my own design. Sometimes getting started means you compromise to move forward. Sometimes it means you must first find balance, realizing that the things you want may in fact be multi-faceted or that your goals require a multifaceted approach and multifaceted thinking. Or so I’d like to think.
One thing I’m sure of, with this post, the hard part is now complete and that most often time the most difficult part of any endeavor, Getting Started is now complete. Welcome to johnplante.com.