Pledge

Pledge came up the other day. Ryan and I made some limoncello (vodka "infused" with lemon peels and sugar), but somehow--whether it be the quality of the vodka or the wrongness of the recipe--it went wrong. We decided to take it along to a housewarming-ish party with some of our closest friends and try it out.

One of the guests opened the bottle and took a big whiff. "It smells like Pledge!" he declared, not wrong in the least. The brave ones took more than a sip of the homemade elixir...but most of us just let it burn our nostrils or the tip of our tongues.

But pledge came up in my mind in a different sense today. With this blog, I had hoped to pledge to write for an audience--be it of one or many--every day. And as Ryan has pointed out, this will be my first post in August, though the month is more than halfway over.

I would hope that I keep a pledge to a friend better than I keep a pledge to myself. But I want to make it up to you, my audience (be you few or many), and to myself.

Simplicity and creativity are two things that I want to use to enhance my life and the life of the people around me. I hope to inspire and be inspired, to pare down so that my creativity can be broadened. With less clutter in my life, whether it's stuff or idle time, I hope to have more time and energy to devote to writing and other creative things. I know that the upcoming year will be very busy with a change in career path in mind, but I want to devote time to the things that I know will make me grow as a person.

So there is my pledge to myself: to do something each day that makes me grow and learn.