Hi. Squeaky clean new place, just built, with freshly painted walls. This place to me, from this vantage point, looks both frightening and exciting. Frightening, because I dive in with no particular plan, if I’m honest. Exciting, for all the reasons moving into a new home is exciting, and just the way writing makes me feel. The tingle in my fingers that need to broadcast the inside of my head.

What to expect from here? That was the questions I’ve been trying to answer for past month or so. Which of my variety of interests and endeavors to pick? Constraints are good! Welcome limitations! Don’t spread yourself too thin. Write with a laser focus! And so on. Which, in my case, for a start, would be one of the following.

• Things I learn at work as a product manager
• My escapade of learning languages (currently German)
• My exploration of various teas, and notes about everything around that
• Habits and routines
• Being a parent
• Life as an expat
• Reviews of books that I read
• Anything and everything from above

How much of interest is a personal blog about anything? Probably not much.

I gave it a month. Maybe more. Tried to leave these thoughts alone, and also introduce a decision to just leave this alone and not publish anything outside. No, I want to write. After a month passed, I still had nothing specific. No single point where I could start, apart from what interests me in this very moment, in this time.

So I’ll let the pressure of choosing go. I’ll start writing, and see if it takes a shape, or evaporates, dissolves like a cloud.

I have nothing to offer but this concept of “before and then”. Transformations, progress. I was thinking about it the other day. How much the society is hooked on progress, and getting somewhere, achieving something. It’s the unspoken “progress or death”. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the pressure of harder-better-faster-stronger is not even… real, maybe we don’t need it — as much as we need Daft Punk, for example. Some of what I write is inevitably about the progress, and findings, and learnings. But maybe “achievement” isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s about the change. Anyway, there is always the state before and the state then. This will be the glue that holds the writing in the confinements of this blog together.

What was before this blog? I started describing my work and professional experience, got bored with myself and deleted it. A lot of things came before, that are harder to describe as they don’t fit into the “where are you from?”, “what do you do for work?” type of questioning-and-labeling. Music business, music listening and promoting, and selling, and books reading (non-professionally, but in time spent it’s probably the biggest part of my life), writing here and there. Now I’m working with product (in the IT sense of the term) with a big media company… I love tea, I’m learning to longboard, I love music… And all of it, and more, is something that brings me to this blog.

I’m an eternal learner, a neophyte. Everything has its “before-then” continuity for me. So this is what I’ll start with.

Wish me luck, and check in from time to time.