My First Post

 Wow, what a time to be alive...

I thought blogging was slipping further away from the relevance of today's world being taken up by the instantaneous and ever-replacing-flow of social media; like Instagram. Instagram is a river and not the kind of river I am interested in. It is a gushing, momentous, living entity, not capable of being waded through without loosing one's footing. The river, like it stands as a symbol in Buddhism, is in a constant state of change and impermanence. Blogging is contrastingly calm and consistent, able to be revisited time and time again. It functions as a dam. Tirelessly labored into existence to serve for a long time as a resource. Time goes into the dam, and time is required to take from it.

My name is Daniel Stewart, and I am typing this from my London home, where I live with my wife, Julie. It is February of 2021. The world has been blanketed for twelve months by a virus so unpredictable, the effect of which is far too large to be reflected on succinctly yet and would just cause for bad-reading. As we move into the warmer seasons in the Northern Hemisphere the Earth should begin to look like it's old self again. Although the line of time moves only forward, it seems now more than ever one thinks about the past for comfort over an uncertain future. Things are well-and-truly changing in the river of life, the river is flowing quickly.

The blog has managed to stay, fortified (much like a dam), throughout the whole lifespan of the wider use of the world-wide-web. The first blog was made in the year of my birth, a time I do not remember much about. I do however know that a quarter century or so later, the blog has withstood the constant and increasing flow of the river. As we integrate further with technology, the blog allows a calmness, an almost unavailable sense of slowness. I hope it can be a resource for others as much as I hope it to be one for myself.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

- Heraclitus