Why We Shouldn't Push Ourselves To Write

To cultivate, harvest, and harness original thought is by far the most beautiful thing humanity should be grateful for. To think independently, without fearing about the saturation of our cognitive potential, is the sole reason we can operate in such intricate social, cultural, academic, and behavioural constructs.

With the advent of linguistics, we as a species were able to make discrete statements about our present states of mind, and not rely on the arbitrary contemplation of sign and body language.

Such fluency gave us great power. Great power over our thoughts. I think in English.

I visualize a little less, I speak a little more.

With uniform language, came its own forms of propagation.

First came the skill of speech. Speech came with all forms of eccentricities. How loud? How soft? What pitch? For how long? How much voice modulation? These were just a few of the questions meant to be answered to get your message across optimally.

Next came writing. The capability of being able to inscribe whatever your neurons come up with, in response to the events transpiring in our surroundings, immediate or otherwise, is a blessing we often take for granted.

Most humans initially started writing to record - transactions, dates, number of children they gave birth to, etc. But slowly yet steadily, it became behavioural rather than optionally professional. We began to write just because we could. Since our survival days were not too comfy, we decided to make up stories in order to temporarily distract us from the atrocious challenges of primal survival. From Cuneiform to handwritten manuscripts of fables to the Gutenberg Bibles to the large printing presses arisen by the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve all read and written to ponder and to perpetuate; to think and to thank.

We’ve written to express love, joy, affection, hatred, betrayal, comradery, melancholy, confusion, dysphoria, wonder and what not.

But we’ve only written well when we were compelled; by our situations, states of mental spaces, cultural interactions, and self-induced introspection. Most masterpieces were never written by strong business-minded individuals who have it all sorted in life. We have only created commendable works of literature when we were either compensating for traits that are in disproportionate magnitudes imbibed in our personalities into the characters that we created, or when we were trying to fill a void by experiencing things we could never possibly experience in this extremely, unrelentingly, practical world. Fantasy and flimsy have never come out of a fulfilled mind. That is not to say, that satisfaction deteriorated our writing. It only implies that if we are seeking experiences not just limited to our real lives, we are willing to acknowledge and experience emotions that we admit to not frequently experience in real life.

This is exactly why we shouldn’t be writing when we don’t feel like it. Pushing ourselves to write when we don’t even feel like thinking about writing is when we should realise that we have received our breaking point - when you have nothing to do. And to have nothing to do is the best thing a writer could possibly ask for. To have nothing on our minds is when we start paying extra attention to the little things, which we never considered to be substantial enough to articulately ponder about through writing.

This is when revolution strikes.