After blogging for a couple of months I felt a change coming. When I first started writing, I had just come out of the hospital from having our baby. Literally, I got home on Sunday and started designing, building, and writing – completely shocking Husband at the amount of energy I had that first week with a newborn baby.
I knew there were things that I was going to want to change, I knew there were things that I was going to need to learn, but being who I am, I needed to leap, cannonball style, into this thing – otherwise I would forever stand on the platform, debating the height of my free fall.
I started teaching myself the way of the Blogger; googling answers to things I had zero idea about, jotting down ideas, planning my time wisely and before I knew it, “Our Buena Vida” was up and running…as well as four other blogs! It didn’t take long to realize that that was nuts. I also started to find other blogs I liked and took note of the things I wanted to steal copy borrow from them. After all, “imitation is the highest form of flattery” and all that. The face of “Our Buena Vida” changed.
The more I invested into blogging, the more ideas I picked up and the more I wanted to change. My original direction of 4 blogs was unrealistic; I needed to join all of them and that could be accomplished with just a few simple changes. But one change that was not simple was the title. Besides being a little basic, “Our Buena Vida” didn’t feel like it encompassed ALL of the things that the new blog would be, it didn’t encompass me. But by now, I had become invested in that name, had become a part of my everyday vocabulary. And though, much of the time, I tend to be a leap first, ask about the net later kind of person, I can also contemplate a leap for a good amount of time.
I stood on the metaphorical platform, pondering the questions we all ponder before a leap. Will it be a hard landing? Will I regret leaping? Will I be turning my back on what I knew before? Silly how I could be that emotionally attached to a blog name, right? But emotionally attached is what I do. So I went to my support group and creative director who is one in the same: Husband whose suggestions are always way less jumbled and crowded than my head.
“Just change it.” He said, “It was a good title. And this will be a good title. And once you change it you’ll be happy you changed it.”
See? I told you. Less jumbled.
And so Drinking the Whole Bottle was born. It felt more like me (cause I like wine), was from a quote from my favorite author and is a great metaphor for life – savor every last drop.
For a good part of my life now, when I am not sure about a decision I try to remind myself of the saying, “Leap and the net will appear. ” I have made some decisions that many people might not have seen as reasonable or responsible but I know me and I know God and the Universe are working to help me land on my feet. (Well, sometimes I land on my ass but the fall is never hard enough that I can’t get up and move forward.) So, I jumped, moving all blogs into one big blog bottle and Husband was right. I do like it.
Sometimes, leaping is the most natural thing in the world; sometimes it just makes sense. And sometimes you have to think about it for a bit before making the choice to jump. I can’t tell you that one is more right than the other; right is whatever feels good to you at the moment, but what I can tell you is that I have never regretted leaping. I have leapt… and the net has always appeared.
Happy leaping!
