Beginning the way

There’s a word I keep coming back to: michi. It means a road, a journey, but it’s also the -dō that ends words like jūdō, shodō, and chadō. In those, it stops meaning “a road to somewhere” and starts meaning something closer to a discipline you devote yourself to.

I wanted a name for this site that held both senses at once, to find a simpler, more harmonious balance by treating the ordinary work of development as a craft, and bringing the same discipline to the rest of my life. This site is my way of documenting the changes I will make along that journey.

Why a site, and why now

I’ve spent years shipping things for other people and although there is a certain amount of satisfaction in that it doesn’t scratch the itch of developing something for yourself.

More importantly, recently I suffered a touch of burnout, a combination of work pressure and my tendency to hyper-focus on a goal at the expense of my personal health and well-being.

I want to get into the habit of documenting my efforts here so that the site becomes a space for accountability and reflection, where the professional and personal can accumulate in one direction over time.

The aims:

• Persist with a single personal project and see it through to the end.
• Health and fitness first and the rest will follow.
• Keep things simple and focused.
• Document and reflect.

On keeping it simple

The aesthetic here is deliberate. Ink black, a ladder of greys, and a single blossom highlight. The Japanese idea of ma, negative space as an active part of the composition, is doing most of the work.

The way is made by walking.

First step taken.