People say "Go touch grass" all the time, I've even said it to myself at different points in my life.

At some point, I stopped touching grass. I don't know when, and I don't think there's a specific reason why. However, looking back this was likely some time during high school.

I didn't just stop touching grass though. I stopped any and all creative outlets, didn't look after my health, and didn't really do much other than play games and work. I used to spend loads of time reading and even stopped that.

Some time in 2019 I read The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, then in 2020 when i went to read the next book in the The Stormlight Archive I realised that I couldn't remember the last time I'd read a book prior to The Way of Kings. I'd read some manga though even that was sporadic at best.

From that point a conscious effort was made to start reading again. Something that, at times growing up, consumed me as much as video games had.

I love reading books.

I absolutely adore it.

Yet somewhere along the way I just stopped without realising. I stopped touching grass in the world of novels.

It still took a few years but now I read so much more, and sometimes even have trouble deciding which I want to do more, game or read.

I record and note down every book I read, and will make a post later on about how I manage all of that because I think it's quite interesting.

More recently I've been making more conscious efforts to touch grass and balance things out a bit in my life after what I would describe as minor burnout and potentially a minor quarter life crisis (this is a real thing by the way).

I've lost a lot of weight and got my health back on track, and been dabbling with different creative outlets.

Drawing has been one. Something I always did was aimlessly doodle in books and margins during class or meetings. Though recently I have been actually learning to draw, nurture it as a skill, and create things I have always wanted to.

The second and third are more recent and have been going on at the same time.

One is photography. I have always wanted to capture the world the way I see it and get closer to the things I can't see with the naked eye.

So I went out and bought a Canon EOS R50 and started taking it with me on walks around the local botanical gardens, which has given me a new appreciation for them.

The other is this blog. Creative writing was something I enjoyed so much when I was younger, and while this isn't creative, it is still writing, and it has helped me order my thoughts and tease out things about me that I didn't even realise until I started to record them. Who knows, maybe I'll dabble a bit in creative writing again.

So yea, I've been touching grass a lot more recently. Both literally and figuratively.

What started as a slow, unconscious buildup has become a more active and focused effort.

I won't share all of that here, this is likely to be the most introspective post I make. Most of the time I expect to be posting books I've read, pictures taken, and reviews of things I like.

Not everything you write or draw has to have deep meaning. Sometimes things can just be cool and you want to post about it to share the cool thing.

With that I will leave you with this.

Hey look at these cool pictures I took with my new camera.