My 400th Blog Post

I wasn't counting, but Google Blogger was, and this apparently is my 400th blog post.

I've been blogging for two years now, posting sometimes every day, sometimes every couple of days, sometimes letting a week or more go by between posts. But even without too much of an attempt at rigorous self-discipline, too much self-flagellation to keep myself on task, it's added up to a tidy sum. Four hundred is a big number.

This really does illustrate one of my major life principles: little things add up to big things. A page a day written in an hour a day adds up to 365 pages a year. A page a day written in an hour a day with LOTS of days taken off to do other things has still added up to at least a book a year for me.

I've enjoyed wearing a pedometer and watching my steps over the course of a day add up to the target of 10,000 even without any significant trek, just by teaching my classes and walking back and forth across campus.

Of course, this summation process can be problematic in certain contexts: I think we've all had the shock of getting a huge credit card bill at the end of a month in which we made no major purchases at all, just a series of $23 here and $37 there. An extra hundred calories every day will add up an extra pound around the waist at the end of the month. On the other hand, savings can grow in this same way, and giving up a mere hundred calories every day will trim a pound from the waistline every month, as well.

Former Senator Everett Dirksen is often quoted as having said, in the context of the federal budget, "A billion here, and a billion here, and pretty soon it starts to add up to real money." (Prophetic quote, that!).

A blog post here, a blog post there, and pretty soon it adds up to 400 blog posts. And that's real blogging.