Apart from a cheesy short-lived LiveJournal that was intended primarily to woo my sweetie (now my spousey), I have resisted online blogging for…well, pretty much ever. There are many wonderful blogs out there that I really do value and get a lot from reading, but for me to blog seems a rather horrible mix of narcissism and exhibitionism.

So why now? OK, admittedly it’s primarily to figure out how WordPress works so I can be a teensy bit of use to the good folks at One Earth Sangha. Being off work for 8 months and counting, and unable to do much volunteer work, I find myself concerned that the balance scale of what I’m contributing to the world vs. what I’m consuming of the world has tipped far too far in one direction. Recovery is a good and worthwhile activity but if I’m not actually working on stuff I care about, my mental health tanks.

This is not shocking given my belief in interdependence. How can I be doing well if the world is going to shit?

Hence the name of the blog. The Japanese proverb “fall down seven times, stand up eight” has for many years now been a strong theme in my life. As I seem to have the falling down part totally perfected, currently I’m focusing on practising the standing up part. So the title of this blog is both an aspiration and also, like my Dharma name, a kick in the pants – stand up, Eko! Or, minus the comma, an aspiration to become the kind of stand-up guy that people know they can count on (as consistency and commitment are two of the things most challenging these days). If only WordPress could handle punctuation in URLs…

So, in addition to learning some tech skills actually relevant to the current century (as it seems, shockingly, nobody uses the HTML tag <pre> any longer) I thought it might be useful to have a place to write about the connection between standing up for myself and standing up for bigger things too.

And here we are.