Why write something??

There’s a great chance either you, or someone around you is a writing person. What I mean by writing is either they maintain a Diary, or a Journal, perhaps they blog, or maybe they have a notebook they use to evaluate situations and make decisions. If not that, I’m sure majority of us are taught in schools to make a diary and write at the end of a day something in there. But why do all these people write?? That’s a question I’ve asked myself on a number of occasions, and I’ve been pondering about it for quite some time now. Here are my thoughts about what writing, whether it’s about something, someone, some emotions, something you’re going through, analyzing some situation, or just having a conversation with an imaginary friend, does that people like. Or at least their brain does.

First thing that clicked me, writing helps pace one’s thought. We’ve all been told to “take a deep breath”, to “just think”, or “hold up, let me think about this”. Out mind is analyzing a hell lot of things at the same time. When we “hold up” and “take a deep breath”, what happens is we allow our mind to take a step back, settle down, and focus on one thing. That allows it to clearly analyze a situation, and develop a sense of understanding. This understanding can be in any form, clarity, appreciation, etc. Thus, we pause thinking about everything else when we are analyzing some difficult situation, or admiring a landscape, and so on. It’s like trying to understand a painting at an art gallery (not the modern art from all the Instagram reels), I’m talking about those where there is some situation, some room with a bunch of people for example, where there is some deeper story. When you look at it as a complete picture, at first you might appreciate the colors, or how it looks. Then, you start to look at particular parts of the drawing, when you focus on individuals in the painting, things, the sunshine, the shades and theme, the dog, you start understanding why things are like how they are. You notice expressions, emotions, subtle hints of the situation the artist tries to capture. After spending some time, having explored many little details, you take a step back and you look at it, as a complete picture again, but now with a different depth of understanding. Writing something, in my opinion, has a similar effect on our thoughts. When we pace our thoughts, take them one at a time, we develop a better understanding.

Okay, so getting to better understand something by pacing your thoughts, is that what writing is all about.

There is also this flip-side of the situation I described above. There might be cases you are unable to process something. Figure this situation, you are sitting in an exam hall. You cannot remember some answer, but you have an idea of it. It’s like it’s in your mind but it won’t come down into words. In most cases, just starting with the answer helps. You write the first line, and many times, you remember a little bit every time you write more. If you are lucky, the whole thing might come back and you can save yourself from telling your parents “They liked my answers so much they’re gonna make me give it again”. What happened is you stopped, caught the first sort of clear thought you had and wrote it down. Now, once you’ve written it down, it can’t float away. Then you try to focus on that, and catch another one, maybe similar to the first one or maybe something new you happen to catch. Thus, a messy swarm of thoughts you cannot make into words gets tackled one at a time. This can help in situation like when you are feeling lost. Writing helps you gather yourself in such situations. It make it easy for us to gather our thoughts and make an anchor for our brain.

Fun fact, when I sat down to blog this thought about writing, I only had the first part ;)

These are my thoughts, there can be many more reasons people might like writing. I personally also enjoy penning down my thoughts on a piece of paper, I’m in tech and I type most things, and enjoy getting to experience writing something with a pen and paper. Writing something also helps me gather my focus, cause I can type with muscle memory, audio and video can easily get ignored, but writing needs attention.