Writing

Writing has always been a difficult thing for me to do. I love doing it, yet I struggle to get started. It requires a certain level of focus that is irrespective of my environment; in other words, writing is not dependent on how I'm doing it. Writing only happens when I make it happen. There is a reason why people say they get into "flow states." I attain a flow state when writing entries for this blog. It is something that I fall into, often by forcing myself to start with a few sentences. Suddenly, I find that I have an entire entry done within 10 minutes.

Sometimes I'll be in the middle of doing something else before I decide to start writing. My brain will be in a sort of scattered state of trying to find out what to do next, but when I start writing and calm down. I become focused. My thoughts become like a pinpoint - accurate, purposeful, decisive. I can direct them to form the words I need to convey the correct ideas. They flow together. Writing is an important part of my being, one of the few activities that I can do that seemingly slows down time.

Although, no matter how hard I try, writing remains a habitual activity just out of my reach. I do it sporadically, without any rhyme or reason. Once a week I will get my burst of desire for letting my words flow out into the ether. For the rest of the week, I am in a state of brewing ideas for what I could write, but they don't always come to fruition. Every day, I silently mourn the loss of these ideas that I can't remember because I didn't have the strength to spend time on their fruition. But these are small losses.

Ideas are free, one of the few actually free things in the world. They are small, easy to convey packets of information that can be transmitted between people in so many different ways. Ideas are like sparks that can be ignited from any source, be it what someone said or something that we saw in another work of art. There is no way to record all of them.

Writing, the transmission of ideas through words, will always be integral to my existence. Nothing that I do exists without writing. Coding, reading, browsing the internet all require writing. It is an activity of focus and deep reflection. It requires me to extract the words from my own mind to describe my thoughts. That is what makes it so difficult. The brain is always seeks the path of least resistance, yet the most important, difficult paths lead inwards.