Silk Blogs - Raymond Inkabi - The Tyranny of Happiness

A commemorative blog

December is always a significant month for me in terms of celebrations. 20 days ago, I reached another landmark of 12 years of blogging and a week ago, I turned 50.

I had considered marking these significant events by inviting friends to blog on my blog, but the attempt was half-hearted, besides the fact that since the 17^th of November, I have only spent 4 nights at home, the rest has been on the road, for work and much else.

However, even that feeble call for contributions was heard by one of my social media friends who also contributed to the Decade Blogs of 2013, his commemorative piece then titled, Ten years of Blogging.

Raymond Inkabi, this time for my Silken Blog anniversary, using wedding anniversary terminology, writes on blogging as a purpose with the title The Tyranny of Happiness, I am happy and honoured to have him write for my blog again. He tweets with the Twitter handle @Alykka and writes his own blogs at http://RaymondInkabi.WordPress.com.

The Tyranny of Happiness

How we handle the now, defines what lies in the future and in the wine dark hollow belly of our immortal soul. Now how this soul is a place of internal play of tensions, struggles, indecision, writer's block, mood swings, anger, as much as a place of desire, peace, happiness, imagination and the writing of the self is one to be researched on.

To write blogs and then keep writing, displays a tension between two psychological positions: blogging to testify to an identity of (see, this is who I am) but also, blogging to bear witness to all who might want to listen to your story (see, this is who I am prevented from being).

Blogging is thus configured as a gateway that is, a route of escape in search for eternal fulfilment and inner peace. Which is found only embodied in our blogs which turn a playground, stage and laboratory, with the aim of producing and creating singular and multi-plural ways of the pursuit of happiness.

The shifting back and forth between writing and not writing, lies at the heart of our soul at a time in our collective history when new information technologies (social networks, commentary, art, philanthropies, what is and what is not, political correctness, exotic travels and saving the world) are reconfiguring our relationship to time, space and balance.

This indeed posits that we are not alone and Calypso in our domestic life, our life is pervaded with outside voices that come to inhabit and activate it, as if to find one’s voice, one had to first let oneself be taken over by the voices of others, as if one had to read the world before one could write it. And reassuringly, continues the blurring of the borders between to write and not to, interiority and exteriority, to tweet and not to tweet, follow and to unfollow, and "to be or not to be" - apologies Shakespeare, enabling each of us to fuse, superimpose, combine and separate those borders that hint of not just the inevitableness of a writer's block, but any block.

For Twelve years of blogging activity, makes it possible to activate and redefine one’s presence in the world, and serve as a powerful catalyst of forms to establish an identity.