I Write, Therefore I Am

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind

- Antoine De Saint-Exupery (French Aviator, Writer).

I'm typing these lines on a Saturday night. It has been a full and busy week as usual and I spent my Saturday as usual shopping for food and groceries in the morning and jogging at the park in the evening. I also write in my journal with my array of fountain pens. I also have a collection of inks of different colours ranging from the usual black, blue, red to more exotic colours from Diamine with fancy names like Claret, Green Umber, Steel Blue and Apple Glory. Writing longhand is a completely different experience from typing on a keyboard. You literally stroke your mind with the nib of the pen to tease out your innermost thoughts.

What's the benefit of writing in a journal? My main motivation for doing so is to understand myself better. When you put thoughts on paper, especially with a fountain pen, you slow down the pace of your thinking and allow the mind to breathe. Scribbling your thoughts on paper is like a mathematician working out a complex problem by first capturing it in a set of equations before working them out to their logical conclusion.

The pen acts like a seismograph--registering the minute movements of your thoughts. When you capture the stirring of your emotions on paper, you see them in their true colours. You feel their vibrations at the tip of your pen. Every nuance of your inner motivations are captured in the variation of your ink strokes on paper. I just love watching a wet fountain pen making marks across the surface of the paper. To me, that is how God created the universe--by writing out the Word.

Writing is spiritual. The act of drawing lines on a piece of paper that reflect the promptings of your mind is a piece of performance art.   You know your writing has quality when you've bridged the gap between thoughts in the head and written sentences on paper.  Writing longhand with a fountain pen helps in the process. The pen is a transducer of thoughts -- tapping the signals of the mind and amplifying them on paper, to be analyzed, read and disseminated, where they will trigger further thinking in better minds, influencing events in the real world.

I've called this process writhink.  Writing physicalizes thinking, allowing the signal of your thoughts to find their true expression in the external world. When you write what Hemingway calls a true sentence, you know that the sentence expresses the thought in the best possible way. And there's nothing more to say about it. That's one brick in the cathedral you're building in your mind. And you move on to the next true sentence.

Well, I am no Hemingway nor Exupery. But I write, therefore I am.