Tues, May 29
... When will we see what's staring us in the face?
I miss writing just for the sake of writing. Taking the most abstract thought on my mind at any given time, and rambling on about it--sometimes making sense, sometimes not; but always writing, getting my ideas down into words, even if the words are a poor reflection of the reality of the situation. My own head gets so muddled sometimes that trying to think through a complicated situation is about as effective as trying to remember everything I have to do at work, without a to-do list. I keep rehashing the same events, conversations, dreams, thoughts, whatever, over and over again, never getting anywhere. When I write, it becomes more for my own sanity than anything--writing to lay out my life in some semblance of order; to look at the confusion somewhat rationally and see it from a different perspective than my head allows.
And then comes the "prescribed" writing--papers, letters, memos--These are the assigned tasks that make me forget how to write for the sake of writing; how to write for the sheer art of analyzing the human experience and savoring the delicious mystery that it will always remain.
Words are therapeutic. When nothing else will work, when there's no one else to talk to, writing honestly is a greater therapy than anything else. Writing honestly. Not for the sake of future generations who might come across my old diaries in the attic someday, but for me. Besides, if my great-grandchildren do someday find my writing, won't it be a greater pleasure for them to read what I really wrote, not the drivel that I spewed out because it was what was expected of me?
Reading and writing simply for pleasure is quickly becoming a lost art. We read and write what we need to for communication: we send one-sentence messages that require no grammatical skill or creativity across a phone line, we develop shorthand to give ourselves fewer characters to type, we send e-mails that say what we need to say in as few words as possible, we balk at using "snail mail"--and at writing the 10-page letter that makes using the mail so much fun--we sneer at any assigned reading longer than 100 pages, and we definitely do not read books that are not necessary to pass a class. We don't listen to each other--we read each other's typed shorthand. We don't recognize the importance and love of a handwritten letter. What we know about literature comes from the movies that the books were made into. It's no wonder that we have shorter attention spans, poorer thinking skills, deficient grammatical knowledge, and bad handwriting. We live in a society that feeds this neglect, and the more it is fed, the more it grows, and the more it grows, the more it must be fed. When will people wake up and realize that we need to reclaim the lost art of real communication?
And yet, I sit in my office, at a computer, staring at a screen of flashing lights, writing this rant about how much we need to live in a world where communication is real, words are real, and life is not just about speed and convenience.
I miss writing for the sake of writing; reading because I want to be enlightened into someone else's view of the world; listening because I truly care; caring because I am human.
infinite || abyss
posted at 6:17 p.m.
