During the formative years of LoyarBurok (‘the LB’), I tasked myself with the responsibility of discovering interesting local and foreign amateur legal blogs. The purpose was two-fold. The first was to seek the blog writer’s permission to republish their post on the LB. The second was to invite them to write for us.

On one of my blog-hunting forays, I came across a local one titled Friendly Neighbourhood Lawyer. It’s not around anymore. It was run by a then-young lawyer named Weng Tchung. This was about twelve, thirteen years ago. The impression I have of his pieces was that they were well-written and thoughtful. He posted with some regularity too. I thought he was a suitable writer for our blawg.

I wrote to ask his permission to republish his pieces on the LB and invited him to write for us. He declined. Fair enough. Interestingly, he went on to explain:

‘I prefer my blog’s existence (and my own, for that matter) in cyberspace to more of an accidental discovery rather than a result of active publicity.’

Although I was disappointed to be declined on both fronts, I empathised with his sentiments completely. I was delighted to discover someone who enjoyed being a flint for the sparks of serendipity.

A couple of years before my friends and I set up the LB, I wrote on a blog I shared with two other friends. We all wrote under our respective pseudonyms. The writing was creative and experimental.

We wrote whatever we felt like without caring. There were snippets of fiction, poetry, both in Malay and English, stream of consciousness stuff, picture essays, essays about irreverent topics, and politically incorrect ones too. We wrote with the freedom and abandonment anonymity allows for.

It was during that time I had my longest stretch of writing consistently. I posted something every day for almost a whole year.

Pretty much every night after dinner I would fire up the computer and start pouring out whatever ideas or thoughts I had earlier in the day or whatever came to mind then and there. I write out the visions and ideas that played out in my mind earlier to better feel what they looked like. If nothing came to mind, I forced my fingers to bang something out and take it from there.

I had to because I imposed a rule on myself that I would not do anything else until I finished a piece, no matter how crap it was. Occasionally it was fast – half an hour, forty-five minutes, sometimes it was slow – an hour, an hour and a half, but often it was a grind – two hours, very often the first half-hour was garbage.

Neither of us promoted the blog. We did not do any publicity for it. I didn’t tell anybody else about it. It wasn’t a place to showcase our finest writing. It was a place to see what our experimental work would look like when placed in the public sphere.

A piece looks different once it is published. The final draft looks exactly the same as the published version and yet they have a very slight difference in texture to them. The published version has a sense of solidity and corporeality about it that the draft lacks. The published version had that sense of it being engraved in stone about it. There was a a finality to it.

That had to be one of the most liberating writing experiences I had – writing anonymously for no one, telling it to no one but then showing it to everyone. I had no expectations of anyone reading our work other than my fellow blog writers. There was a deep sense of relief about it, a relief from expectations.

To find something for the first time, or something that had not been known before:

Cambridge Dictionary, Definition of Discover

What surprised me about that experience, aside from the pleasure of writing and camaraderie, was the delight to be got from allowing ourselves to be discovered, to be being stumbled upon or found. Discovered in a sense of knowing something not known to us personally before.

I was and am grateful to the people that stopped by to read and comment. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be aware of the delight of being discovered. Inherent and integral to that delight was curiosity.

Who were these people who stopped by our blog to read and even leave a comment? What were they looking for beore they stumbled across the blog? What possessed them to click on something to read? Did they find what they expected? Or were they able to appreciate what they found? If they did, what was it?

The notion of discovery is fascinating not so much because of the what – the moving of us from a state of obscurity to acknowledgment if not acceptance – but the how – how did that transition happen? The unique pattern of a discovery and its serendipity are major elements that comprise that delight.

That brings me to my experience with the present blog, From the Bar Stool. In these last year or so of writing, I have learned that a far more powerful and therefore dangerous stimuli to the delight from being discovered is the pleasure from publicity and acknowledgment.

Unlike my previous experience with my earlier blog or the LB, I thought to promote the present one modestly. I post once on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I don’t spend any money to boost it. I don’t hire some marketing service to promote it. I don’t force feed it to others through Whatsapp. I do not resorting to gimmicks – clickbait titles, sexy visuals, or addressing the new, hot thing.

Now even though I do not do these things, the temptation to do them to boost numbers is there. In fact, it’s constantly there, like a tiny hum in the background that easily merges into the general cacophony of noise – that hunger for the pleasure from publicity and the attendant high readership, which may or may not translate to a wider long-term audience.

Every now and again I catch myself thinking – wouldn’t it be nice to have an even wider audience, for the blog to be even more popular, why don’t I promote it more intensely? Wouldn’t it be flattering to see high readership numbers in the statistics? These questions and the motivations that drive it come from the pleasure from publicity. And they can be quite tedious, almost like a nagging consultant.

When I ask myself questions like those, I know that the baser pleasure from publicity had surpassed the delight from discovery. I know that feeling of an urge for personal glory. I know that instinct to rationalize that marketing is a way to help others discover the blog, so I should do lots of it. I know too that I am thinking from my ego than I am feeling from my soul.

And I know now that acting from such a place will inevitably get me into trouble at some point.

It is for that reason, I have decided on a relatively ‘ascetic’ path to the present blog’s promotion in the media. I prefer to let time and fate take its course. Everything will happen in its own time and place.

The delight from being discovered is a more personal, petite and fragile type of pleasure compared to the big and boisterous blast one gets from the pleasure from publicity. I find the former more lasting, meaningful and in accord with my own orientation towards self-promotion.

Not promoting the blog personally too hard allows for that gap of opportunity for discovery and delight to happen.

So, on that note, I would like to thank each and every one of you who stopped by this quiet corner of the internet for a read or two, dropped a comment, shared a post, got in touch, came over for a tea, shared a meal, and above all for engaging with me on, off or through this blog in whatever way. I hope you benefitted or took some pleasure from it or it led to a train of thought or events that resulted in that.

It has been a distinct privilege and pleasure to connect to others in a serendipitous way. It has been a delight not just to be discovered but also to discover the wonder of others, for discovery is always a two-way street.

Discovering and being discovered is a distinct reminder that my time and appreciation are more worthwhile spent on the wonders of life instead of simply my accomplishments and my shallow expectations of life.