Why Write?
It’s so easy not to write, I think that’s why I took so many days not writing this even when I decided that I need to write something. It’s also a funny thing that I got so many ideas when I’m not writing and when I sit down to write, I can’t think of much. I think it’s similar to when we’re told that we have to speak on something, and you ask yourself that you generally have a lot to say on that topic but at this moment why can’t you get it together in your head? It’s some sort of a camera shy. I think it’s very hard to sit down and write these days because you’re never bored, there’s always something interesting going on-on your phone, this attention whore. Sometimes I think I just need one gig and if I could survive or probably thrive on that, I’ll get rid of this thing that devours all my time. But, at the same time I think it is something of a thing to master. And if you do that, you win. You use it to serve you whereas everyone else is just giving in to the temptation. It’s a Pandora’s box.
It is so interesting to me, when I read the above passage and trace where one thought starts and where it leads, it’s like a tree with different branches of thought and the utter uncontrollable chaos. I think if I keep writing, I’ll chart out the entire neural network in my brain through these words. It is such a hard task to streamline your thoughts. But, that is one thing that writing does. It lays out your brain in front of you to see it. Like you took a shotgun at your own head and laid it all out in front of you. We could clean it up later, but for now we bleed.
But, what the hell good does it do to see our own thoughts? Don’t I know it, already? We probably do in some sense, but I would also say, no. I don’t think we know ourselves until we are tested. But, even if we do, it’s like the difference between knowing all the colors and make a painting out of them. In a way, I think writing is like a complex data processing system, we lay out our thoughts, we discard bad ideas, we let the good ideas stay there, and maybe we generate even better ideas by taking multiple good ones. In a way, it is an extension of our brain.
Writing is also a great way to communicate, a little slower but better until we become articulate in our speech, which I believe is a skill to master in it’s own and much more difficult because you have to think at the speed of your speech. But, here we could take as much time as we want and make our words as sharper as they can be. And it is important that we are good at communicating or how else are we going to negotiate with our reality for the things we want. And mostly it is not as apparent as to what we want, and if we decide to pursue what we want, it better be worth the pursuit.
Personally, for me it has been this question of what is to be done with this life. In a way, it is the question that we want to be asking ourselves. What is it that we value so much that it is worth pursuing for the rest of our lives. The answer is, I don’t know yet. But, it appears that in some way the pursuit should be worth the pursuit. Because, we’re gonna spend much of our lives in the pursuit, it doesn’t make sense that a life not-lived-well will be worth anything. For me, writing this today is worth writing it.
