The New First One
Jul 06, 2023, New Freedom. Last night was pretty tumultuous. It was haunted by the one thing I want to keep doing every day that will help me grow as an individual. Writing has been that sacrosanct place that is very dear to my heart but practicing it as a free-form creative outlet is tough to execute. That led me to think to push myself to keep writing daily and see where it goes.
Some days I feel like I have so many things to say and I am overflowing with ideas and thoughts that I end up spinning them in my mind leading to nowhere. On other days I am gasping for ideas to even think about. Sometimes those nothing-to-think days are good for mental health where you can just relax in the void and not think about anything.
The bone-chilling reality of writing is that it sounds so simple at first. You only need a laptop with a decent keyboard and maybe you can do away with an internet connection. It is liberating. On the other hand, you start thinking about what to write and how deep you want to go in the rabbit hole, and how to validate your ideas with sound research and backing up claims with facts. That has been my Achilles heel.
To grow at anything is to do more of it in a more deliberate fashion. One of the best intentional things you can do to write more is to read first. This might sound counterintuitive. It did so to me too. Reading is akin to talking to smart people but at scale. The more you read the more you get exposed to refined thoughts. The author of a book has gone through an arduous process to make a point with thorough research and sometimes thorough debate with themselves. Like anything else, reading is a personal experience taut with personal preferences and this you should understand carefully. It is ok to start reading something you find interesting but it is completely fine to let it go midway if you are not getting what you want. This might simply mean that the content is not ready for your consumption at the time. Use a simple way so that you can find it again. More on this later. One thing on my backlog to read is an essay by David Foster Wallace called "E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction". I even have a print copy of it and I found the first couple of paragraph intriguing but it is a tough read and even tougher when you have two boys scurrying around your reading time hurling projectiles. Something with boys and their tendency to hurl things at each other. Growing up reading has liberated me in more ways than I could have ever imagined. Over the years my investment in reading has exponentially decreased. That has to change. As one of my deliberate attempts to get back into the good habit of reading, I am giving myself 66 days to read daily and make it a habit. The good news is that I am never short of things to read and have a healthy backlog thanks to my friends.
One day I want to explore how reading has changed my life and fuelled my journey with hope and joy. One day I hope I can do the same about writing. This is a restart of sorts. Beginning of new innings.