It's perhaps fitting that, on the seventh day of January, I meditate on the power of seven and, in particular, the significance of seven years.
It has been just over seven years now since I began recording, journalising and diarising my life in this online form. It began as a series of parallel documents which addressed a particular topic or theme in my life rather like vertical sections through strata of rock. Naturally, various people, places, incidents would be common to more than one of those documents and links could be made to each of those rather like horizontal sections through the same rock formation.
And I realised that if you drew a diagram of the connections with vertical lines as the documents and series of other lines delineating the commonalities then the result was a web - a life seen as a web, a WebLife. And I also realised that that was a image I could live with. It felt truer that the normal, linear narrative of the published, book-form autobiography.
I forget when (it was sometime during the second or third year of writing) but, at some point, the whole project achieved a sort of critical mass where there was enough material for the cross referencing to be both a record and a tool - a tool to enable me to correct false impressions of the past and a tool to enable me to see patterns unfolding.
I've now been at it for seven years. And I am a different person from the 41 year old (soon to be 42) who began typing on that January morning in 1996.
Quite literally, I am different.
I remember being told by someone a long time ago that, after seven years, every single cell in your body changes. The bone marrow cells are the last to change. They take seven years. So, after seven years, someone you met then is quite literally not the person you are know now.
Does this all ring a bell? It does with me because I wrote it down seven years ago. See what I mean about cross-referencing and patterns.
I wrote it in a Journal entry about Ross who I had met for the first time that summer. It was part of writing down, for the first time, some of the difficulties we faced living together.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry but much of what is written there could be written today. How come since we are not the same people on the molecular level? Well, because the issues and the back-history for us both hasn't gone away.
Is this a cause for despair? I think not. The deep-rooted stuff isn't easily resolved or released. The thing is that we work at it. And it is different now from what it was then.