Friday, October 3, 2014

"Writing...Can You Feel It?" by Marsha Mellow

We write to inform ourselves about ourselves. Writing is a lot more than just pen to paper or words to page, writing is contributing ideas to society and feelings to posterity, writing is for the future and about the past, writing is everything it is  made while being everything it already is. And although the idea of writing is not always at the top of the priorities in our personal lives, it is a vital piece of the puzzle. Writing matters and will continue to do so through every era that passes by because it helps us learn as individuals and therefore teaches us about the nature of our population.  

I have found that there is always an undeniable edge in anxiety and a certain spike in uncertainty when writing is mentioned to most anyone. Understandably so, writing the thoughts that lie in the very deep and personal end of your heart is basically terrifying and can seem like the worst idea ever. Thing is, the moment there are no longer any young inexperienced writers, is the moment that the future old and experienced writers get cheated of their chance to grow. Writing is a craft that needs to be continued, not only to pass along scientific findings but also to convey the values and ideas that make up every era.  

The role of writing is very complex within society and within an individual’s life. For me, a life, a world, a universe without the written word is unimaginable. Life has a meaning, it’s meaning is to give it a meaning, to find something that speaks to you on a level that wouldn’t really be complete without writing down  a sentence or two about it, to write it down in hopes that it might touch someone else’s life and help them find their own meaning.

While writing is an important tool for immortalizing facts and has been a vital source of information regarding the ideas and philosophies of our ancestors, it has also allowed us to connect through this broader idea of writing down a story to convey something deeper than a series of events. Writing has taught us that pain and love and hardship have been constants throughout eras, that the fact that the author of your favorite book can touch your modern 20th century life with beautifully placed words crafted maybe before you were even a thought in the universe is important, its a point that only heightens the idea of writing being so vital in understanding the world and everything around us. And there's something spiritual about that, something that serves to connect generations with a string threaded by a sentence, made up of words that together mean so much more than a story. 

Therefore, writing is much more than a hobby or a job, writing is art. A hobby brings pleasure, a job creates wealth, but art makes you feel something. There's fear in writing a story, there's reluctance when writing that essay, there’s passion in writing that poem. That’s the point, that’s why writing matters, because there is something behind it, there's something that defines us as a population as much as it defines us as individuals. Theres somebody's life behind a book, someones dreams behind a poem, someones pain behind a short story, theres so much to convey, so much to learn, so much to accept about our nature. And the more that is written, the more that is read, the more ideas that are sparked, and the beautiful cycle continues.

I think people spend their lives reading, reading books, signs, letters, poems, stories, waiting for something to pull them into a state of realization, waiting for a couple of words to brighten their lives with understanding. People wait for a piece of writing that will change something about how they perceive, they wait for a person to write something groundbreaking that will change their life, never imagining along the way, that that person is them.

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