What you’re reading now is the 100th Third Time Enabled post – and I can scarcely believe that as I write it. Seeing as I didn’t really expect to get this far when I started the blog, you’d think a milestone such as this would require an extensive and predictable commemorative post about how proud I am of it. However, I’m pretty sure I’ve done that before, so something else is in order. I originally had a list of 100 things that made Will, Emily, Tamara and myself happy in the pipeline, and whilst that would be an uplifting idea (and I am keeping it on the sidelines for the future), I didn’t feel like it would be enough on its own. It would be somewhat underwhelming and unable to work without something of substance alongside it – so I discarded that idea.

While mulling all this over, however, I did come to realise that lists are pretty helpful things; not only in terms of looking to the past, but also to the future, which is what I decided this post should do. This revised plan stemmed from one day just a few weeks ago, when I took the opportunity to go to a bookshop during a lunch break at work and invest in a shiny new red notebook. Its original purpose was to help me create the aforementioned list of 100, but in subsequent days it took on a new project – forming the step-by-step future of this blog. In it I wrote titles and topics, prioritising the things I want to cover most in future posts through orderly, numbered lists. It felt like an oddly therapeutic thing to do, but it also helped me to overcome a hurdle that I would say has probably been the thing stopping me from getting this post done for so long – nearly a month, to be precise!

Getting to a stage I never thought I would reach led me to ask myself “where exactly do I go from here?” I wondered if I would either end up disappointing people with everything I wrote or simply repeating myself like a parrot stuck in an endless loop. The worry became so great that I recently tried to delegate the task of writing this 100th post to Will, so that it could come from a different perspective, but I eventually realised that only facing this fear myself would ever get me past it. If you have writer’s block, the best cure is to write, and the new list – written in the latest in a long line of small books – has certainly helped me do that. It might be never-ending, and now I’m about to finish the post I’ve thought so hard about, I feel like the world is mine, Will’s, Emily’s and Tamara’s oyster. The only way is up. Sorry this has taken so long – but here’s to the next 100.

Mason