This I Believe Essay Back to Humanities...
Credo...
I have discovered in the past few years that words are more graceful in interpretation than I will ever find actions to be: more specifically words that are written and not spoken. With reading and writing, just as much can be understood and considered. Through writing I can organize my ideas, create logical solutions, and calm my anxiety. I can say anything I want, and nobody has to see it. I’m still releasing my feelings, emotions, and ideas into reality, but it can still be private and sacred. Energy is released in a gentle way, and received in the same manner. Sometimes the decisions that I make on paper never reach the outside world. Which is almost always fine with me. Then again, other times they are spoken in seminars, exhibitions, and classrooms. Through troubled times though, I’ve always ended up with either a pen and binding in my hands, or a keyboard underneath them. It is calming to me the same way others find running or music to be. Through the years, and through one avenue or another, written words have always given me a place of solace: of un-guilty and reasonable escape. My writing is not highbrow in any way. Not artistic, nor poetic. Frankly, it’s angsty and selfish like any high school students writing is expected to be. Yet in pure sincerity and honesty, it helps.
Essay...
“Writing down what one thinks and feels, one’s desires and reactions, brings about an inward awareness, the cooperation of the unconscious with the conscious, and this in turn leads to integration and understanding.”
-Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
I believe that written words help me. Specifically when I write them myself. My need to write involves my need to cope with reality. Reality as well as my thoughts, because when there is this intangibility floating around somewhere within me, and when I put it into words, it somehow becomes, well, tangible. The murkiness in my fish tank clears up, and I can finally see the fish themselves. The grey fish may be a trouble, the orange one a desire, the spotted one a need, and the snails any other human emotion, feeling, thought, or idea. Most importantly I can watch them and decide whether I want to feed them and let them keep swimming, or let them starve and die. (I don’t do this with my real fish and snails, bless their cold hearts.)
I am in no way a serious, highbrow, published writer. Nor do I think I ever will be. I don’t even write every day. It’s not like, “Dear Diary, today Little Billy said this and I cried.” No, sometimes it is the need to vent, to be selfish, and to aim my tears at the ink just so I can make it pretty and smudge it. Other times, it’s more than that. I have only about five pages in each binding that I like to consider profound and revolutionary. Another ten may not even be my words, but quotes that I’ve dragged from another author’s pages. The rest is a documentation of how I sort through the everyday vortices, (vortices, one of my favorite words), of life. Whether that be intellectualizing my emotions and feelings, or making lists of things I really need to do the next day. It sometimes literally depends on the weather.
Most importantly though, writing is a way through which silence can be found: silence through understanding, silence when the conscious and the unconscious connect, silence that brings about an inner awareness. As I see it, I have the ability to release all thoughts onto paper and keyboard. It’s to make them physical and comprehensible. Yet it’s also to help clear the voices inside my head, the incessant talk and dialogue between all the people within me. From writing there are avenues through which my mind and heart can become quiet. Then, I can truly listen and observe. Then, there is peace. As Anne M. Lindbergh wrote: “I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.”
I have discovered in the past few years that words are more graceful in interpretation than I will ever find actions to be: more specifically words that are written and not spoken. With reading and writing, just as much can be understood and considered. Through writing I can organize my ideas, create logical solutions, and calm my anxiety. I can say anything I want, and nobody has to see it. I’m still releasing my feelings, emotions, and ideas into reality, but it can still be private and sacred. Energy is released in a gentle way, and received in the same manner. Sometimes the decisions that I make on paper never reach the outside world. Which is almost always fine with me. Then again, other times they are spoken in seminars, exhibitions, and classrooms. Through troubled times though, I’ve always ended up with either a pen and binding in my hands, or a keyboard underneath them. It is calming to me the same way others find running or music to be. Through the years, and through one avenue or another, written words have always given me a place of solace: of un-guilty and reasonable escape. My writing is not highbrow in any way. Not artistic, nor poetic. Frankly, it’s angsty and selfish like any high school students writing is expected to be. Yet in pure sincerity and honesty, it helps.
Essay...
“Writing down what one thinks and feels, one’s desires and reactions, brings about an inward awareness, the cooperation of the unconscious with the conscious, and this in turn leads to integration and understanding.”
-Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
I believe that written words help me. Specifically when I write them myself. My need to write involves my need to cope with reality. Reality as well as my thoughts, because when there is this intangibility floating around somewhere within me, and when I put it into words, it somehow becomes, well, tangible. The murkiness in my fish tank clears up, and I can finally see the fish themselves. The grey fish may be a trouble, the orange one a desire, the spotted one a need, and the snails any other human emotion, feeling, thought, or idea. Most importantly I can watch them and decide whether I want to feed them and let them keep swimming, or let them starve and die. (I don’t do this with my real fish and snails, bless their cold hearts.)
I am in no way a serious, highbrow, published writer. Nor do I think I ever will be. I don’t even write every day. It’s not like, “Dear Diary, today Little Billy said this and I cried.” No, sometimes it is the need to vent, to be selfish, and to aim my tears at the ink just so I can make it pretty and smudge it. Other times, it’s more than that. I have only about five pages in each binding that I like to consider profound and revolutionary. Another ten may not even be my words, but quotes that I’ve dragged from another author’s pages. The rest is a documentation of how I sort through the everyday vortices, (vortices, one of my favorite words), of life. Whether that be intellectualizing my emotions and feelings, or making lists of things I really need to do the next day. It sometimes literally depends on the weather.
Most importantly though, writing is a way through which silence can be found: silence through understanding, silence when the conscious and the unconscious connect, silence that brings about an inner awareness. As I see it, I have the ability to release all thoughts onto paper and keyboard. It’s to make them physical and comprehensible. Yet it’s also to help clear the voices inside my head, the incessant talk and dialogue between all the people within me. From writing there are avenues through which my mind and heart can become quiet. Then, I can truly listen and observe. Then, there is peace. As Anne M. Lindbergh wrote: “I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.”