It’s Tuesday. Just another Tuesday. But the Tuesday I tell you, dear friend and reader, that I am now a writer. Yours, present, in the public domain, honest and bearing of my thoughts and feelings and, some might say, my soul.

For whatever it is worth, there will be no more trying. No more promising to myself and others that I will get around to it. No more broken promises and u-turns. No more shame and running away in fear of imperfection. Today is the day, and it will be the same day of the week, every week, for the next year, that I come to you and speak.

I will tell you things.

Stories. For I have lived rich and simple, travelling far and wide. I have many stories to tell. I read stories all my young life, thanks to my mother who read them to me and taught me to love stories. Tracy Chapman, a musical hero of mine, once said that books were windows to the world. Indeed, at fifteen, I stopped reading and dreamed of travelling the world.

Many years later, in a university classroom, I learned the power of storytelling and its power to change lives, even communities. I became a poor actor, a very good director, a teacher of drama and English, terrified of the insurmountable challenge ahead of me. Simultaneously I have been down roads as a songwriter that brought me to many stops and starts, points of confusion about one question: what did I want to do with my life?

I will share with you other things also, in this forum I have created for my own resoundingly lonely voice. And I hope your thoughts will be the echo of mine, changed by what you have heard, unique in your own way, and we can dialogue about the meaning of life. I would like that. I do better when I know someone is listening.

I think I may talk about a handful of matters near and dear to my heart, and these I will refrain from naming at present. Let it be a surprise. For awhile, as my friends from the Philippines say.

It’s Tuesday. This is what I want to say to you. You know where to find me on Tuesday.