The average novel is around 90,000 words.
That means that in my almost ten years here on Hive and its predecessor, I have written in articles alone just over 77 average-length novels worth of words. I know this because the other day I asked @seattlea is there was a way to get all of my articles and he worked something out. At that time, the post count was 7788, but I have actually published 5 more.
It is a bit of a problem.
Because I want to be able to sort through them, review them, take the best and perhaps use them for a personal project in mind for the future, but they are very unwieldy to handle. Because sorting through that many articles is a slow and painful process, and MS Word doesn't handle it at all well.
That is at 12-point text - 22,683 pages (and I cut all the images out) and almost 7 million words. The Guinness record holder for longest published novel is In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, and that runs between 1.2 and 1.3 million words. So I am guessing that Word wasn't made to really handle this kind of volume. Still, it is only a 18.8M file, so I didn't think it would be too difficult to process, but it is. To make it a little easier, I am going to have to go through and add headings and subheadings to more easily navigate - because scrolling is not going to cut it. I have also exported it as a pdf, but that doesn't make it any more usable.
This aside, looking back at all this writing it makes me think, what if I had to look forward to it instead? While I have written and published daily for over nine years, what would I have felt if I was told that I would have to write daily for the next nine years and in that time I would write the equivalent of 77 novels.
That would be daunting.
But I guess the adage of "how to eat an elephant" comes into play as a reminder that even the largest, most seemingly impossible task, is just a series of very small steps. In the case of this, it is a letter at a time, a word at a time, an article at a time, a day at a time - over and over. Looking too far down the road is going to make the task seem impossible, but looking at the next task, the next piece and then building the habits required to keep on walking, makes the longest journey, no more than a step at a time.
We can all step toward our goals.
Everything happens through a series of miniscule movements that lead onto the next. It doesn't matter if we are looking at achieving our goals or observing the big bang that created our universe, it is just a series of actions and reactions and while repetition of the process is key, we can never actually repeat the same action identically. We can never set foot in the same water of a river, as it is always flowing by. Similarly, while one action we make might look identical to the last, we are constantly changing through the conditioning of our body through that repetition. We are getting stronger, learning new information, opening up our insight and improving along the way.
Every time we do something again, we do it differently.
Out of the almost 8000 posts I have published, there are many topics that I have revisited several times and each will have at least a slightly different me writing them. Someone who held one set of knowledge and beliefs in the first compared to someone who held a different set for the next. The topic can stay the same, but it has been added to through experience, and that repetition. We don't have to reinvent the wheel, to improve the wheel. The wheel is the wheel, even with improvements.
In reflection though, I have changed a lot since my first article, which was called Human. But not so much that I am fundamentally different perhaps. Many of my views have changed, my understanding of many facets of life have evolved, and I have experienced a lot of big and small events that have reshaped me. Yet, I am still me at the core, for better and worse. I am sure when I look back at many of these articles once I can sort through them, that I will get that sense of embarrassment and some kind of shame, like looking back at old pictures from high school and noting fashion and hair styles. At the time, it felt right, not so much in the rear-view mirror.
But going forward from today, while the process doesn't change, there are more steps to take, more perspectives to see, more things to learn and more shifts in what I am. I am still finding out what that may be, but perhaps that is the point of life and the changing experiences we face, where we are supposed to discover who we are, by facing what we Wouldn't face if we knew what was coming. And perhaps this is why I am not keen on the culture of today where we can control what we experience, because it limits us to what we want to do and very few of us will ever choose to do what would look like an impossible task, if looking forward.
Looking back, the view of the impossible was proven incorrect.
If we keep choosing what we will experience, we will never test our full potential.
Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]
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