Some Reasons Why You Should Keep Writing

You are facing two roads and either way is dark and mysterious. You know not where it leads or even really how to get there. But despite this, you hold on to the unrelentless belief that one of these paths holds the key to your future.

In thinking and envisioning a choice between two paths, you have unmistakably missed the very truth which has been staring you in the face, wide eyed and unblinking, demanding your attention. In trying to find the answer and the strength to choose between the two paths, you have in fact already chosen it. You are writing. It springs from you a life made into words which are so pure and true you are taken aback by its fearlessness. You have spent years in fear of the words which have haunted you, ghosts of orphans which up until now seemed like lost tortured children, crying out from their dark corner hidden deep in your heart.

These children are the plumage of all your insignificant thoughts running through your brain throughout a day, the falling leaves of a tree of ideas you are so quick to judge and tear down as insignificant. Yet this significance is brought back to life as soon as you set pen to paper.

We grow old day by day, all of us the same. However this knowledge has done nothing to still the anxious beating of your agonized heart. No matter how many times you told yourself “this is normal, the way it’s meant to be” you just couldn’t make sense of anything – time, eternity, the universe or that one day you wouldn’t be here to ponder its endlessness. The older you get the less anything makes sense. Yet at the same time, the more familiar you become to this chaos, you begin to see patterns, sense in the chaos, specks of the purpose you have been looking for your whole life. These can be the people whom you’ve met by chance or perhaps fate, lovers who’ve changed your life so completely that their presence cannot be explained by sheer “coincidence”. Maybe books that you’ve read which spoke as if to you directly. Times and places so magical you’ve dared to ask “have we been here before”? These little signs point you in the direction of another world, a world reached by artists, musicians, writers. It can be reached by imagination, the ability to transport not only yourself but the reader, the audience, somewhere we feel we all belong, where we have all been and where we are all the same, experiencing life through different perspectives, yet experiencing it together nonetheless. People love the same, even if we are all different. Being able to express this may not come easily, but it nevertheless is possible for everyone.

So palms sweaty and fingers clasping at your pen nervously, with all these thoughts bubbling to the very surface of your awareness like a pot containing boiling pasta, these thoughts finally spring into words and brim over the edges of your consciousness demanding to be interpreted and read. They’re significance is brought back to life as soon as you set pen to paper, lost in the ecstasy of the now effortless flow.

These words have been forming themselves in your mind over the course of your life during times you thought perhaps there was something wrong with you, that you were broken, different form everyone else, an alien. Yet as soon as you put pen to paper, as soon as you share your thoughts, readers and writers, we all begin to find sense in the chaos, familiarity in strangeness. We are all different and yet we are all the same.