Writing; finding your inner voice

Writing is a great way of reckoning with ourselves. It is like a mirror that reflects our thoughts in a written form. For me it always helps to relax, take a step back, stop for a while and look back what happened. How do I feel? What do I think about the things happening to me? What comes to my mind? It is a nice way to slow down, summarize my thoughts and start to put them in words.

It is a kind of self-therapy. If we don’t have anyone to talk to, we just have to write it down! It is sometimes the case, that we don’t necessarily want to let another person know our thoughts or feelings, but still feel the urge to give them out of us somehow. Although, writing down our thoughts doesn’t itself guarantee privacy. It depends on who we share it with. Yet, it can still be relieving sometimes that another person first listens to us, in the form of reading it, and only after that says something if it is necessary.

But why do we have this need to immerse ourselves in our thoughts? I don’t know the answer to that, but I will try to put my thoughts about it in writing. I have two things on my mind.

First, we tend to measure things. Let it be age, height, weight, color, size, shape, whatever, we cannot just accept things as they are. We need a benchmark, we need to know how does something performs compared to some other thing. I wonder whether it has always been the case, or this is just inherent in our civilizational development. What is certain, is that with nowadays’ romantic consumerism we can’t help questioning ourselves. And it is really exhausting for our mind. This can be a reason for our need to be alone with our thoughts to process things and find balance.

What makes it worse is that we lack meditative activities. Before the industrial revolution it could have been easier to find and immerse ourselves in activities that are awfully simple and repetitive. By now, most of these have been automated. People are supposed to do more creative and constructive jobs. That is fine. I am a big supporter of technological development and I am grateful to not have to hoe the fields all day long. Today, we just have to look for those truly meditative activities deliberately. No wonder that yoga and meditation are such hip things to do. In this torrent of stimuli we face every day, our mind is craving for some air, some break from all that is going on constantly everywhere. Evolution is lagging behind technological development. Listen to your inner voices, give your mind some break and perhaps try writing.