I launched another blog.

Here’s the thing: When I moved to New York last year, I missed blogging so much that I rushed to create a new blog, Tastee Pudding, within a few months (its tag line: “In the search for creative life, the proof is in the Pudding”). I wrote about creative people, habits, ideas and culture. It was basically Creative DC without the DC.

…and that was its fatal flaw. To succeed, a blog doesn’t just need to be interesting — it needs to serve a need. Creative DC showcased and inspired creative living for a city full of people searching for creative community and inspiration. Tastee Pudding never had that laser-like focus.

Also, I rushed to launch Tastee Pudding because I missed the fulfillment of writing a blog and connecting with its readers. But as with any artistic enterprise, desire alone isn’t enough to carry the day. Without a deep sense of conviction that what I was writing was useful, I felt rudderless. I tried a 30-day blogging challenge (writing every day for 30 days), hoping it would help me find the spark I sought, but it only served to convince me that Tastee Pudding was but a temporary stop on my blogging path.

I played around with a tumblr blog for a while, giving myself permission to do something unstructured as a way of figuring out what exactly I had to say. I even used a pseudonym, “Mandy Miracle,” hoping that straying as far as possible from my blogging history and persona would grant me the freedom to discover inspiration.

And then, a few weeks ago, I was walking my dog when inspiration struck: “ZENyc.” The name popped into my head, just as the name “Creative DC” had come to me back in 2006 (I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Orlando, Florida at the time, bored out of my gourd at a conference for work). Now, standing there on East 10th Street on this early summer morning, I felt a rush, a buzz, knowing I was onto something. The city of New York needed Zen, needed ways to find peace and quiet and sanity amid the noise, the clamor, the chaos; it needed these things in the same way DC had needed a showcase, back in 2006, for its underrepresented creative people and opportunities.

“We give what we most want to get, and we teach what we most want to learn,” Eve Ensler once said at a conference I attended. In DC, I needed creativity; here, in my new home, creativity abounded — but as I struggled with the city’s constant assault on my senses (the noisy neighbors, the smell of garbage on the street, the oven-like subway stops), I needed to find ways to stay centered amid the chaos. And so, ZENyc was born.

The response so far has been encouraging. I hope you’ll check it out, and share it with any friends in NYC who could use a little Zen in their lives. Even more, I hope the story of how I landed at this new blog offers some useful insights as you pursue your own creative projects — straining, experimenting, and allowing yourself to do something completely different on the path to inspiration.

Love,
Amanda