Writing

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.” – Vita Sackville-West

I write all the time, constantly taking notes in Drafts or dictating into my watch. Not much of it sees the light of day, but the process of getting thoughts and ideas out of my head and “onto paper” has all sorts of benefits. Mostly it helps me to work out what I think about things.

The process of writing slows down the thoughts rattling around in my head long enough to deal with them. When facing challenges it helps to get them clarified and to some extent objectified. Getting them out of my head and somewhere that I can look at them helps to get perspective.

I am currently reading Julia Cameron’s Vein of Gold in which she re-introduces the practice of morning pages, the act of hand writing three pages of A4 every morning, first covered in The Artist’s Way. It is amazing how hard this can feel. Around the end of page one three pages feels like a lot! But the point is that in pushing through the trivial verbiage that inevitably starts off this process you eventually start to surface stuff that matters.

It is surprising cathartic to “get things off your chest” in this way and I recommend it if you haven’t already tried.