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Writing To Think

Over the last two years or so I slowly realised that blogging is something that I want to do more often. Or writing in general. Often it was when I read other people's personal blogs that that realisation became a little push. One blog post in particular helped me realise what sort of mental processing the activity of writing evokes. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find it to link to it from here. Instead, here is another short blog post on the topic: "The two kinds of writing" by Herman Martinus. The principle that writing forces you to think wasn't an entirely new one to me. I just hadn't ever deemed it relevant to my life before and so never thought about it. Maybe I still haven't properly, because I never forced myself to do so for more than a minute at a time. But I'm writing about it now, so …

In a way, writing forces you to think like explaining something to somebody else forces you to understand what you want to explain first. Sometimes it is in the middle of a conversation that I realise: What I'm saying, or was about to say, is actually not a well thought through concept; but I hadn't realised this before because I never properly thought about it. But the conversation usually flows on. Even if you do take the time to think something through before you continue to talk, somebody else will likey use the pause to interject what they think at that moment. At least most people tend to do that. But when I write, I can pause however long I want, think about what I was about to say, what words are the best ones to describe what I know already but have never expressed, think about the relevance of my next thought and in what context it stands to what I wrote beforeand so on. I can fact-check something, search for a name, title or quote, read what I've written so far and in general take the time that I need overthink my thoughts before they are out there. That doesn't mean that I always do all of this for everything that I write. For example I often don't re-read immedietely after I wrote something, which leads to a lot of typos living permanently in my blog. I don't research what I write about for a post like this. But to put things into words and to structure thoughts itself already benefits my thinking. It takes a long time for me to write. Even a sentence like the last one can have several pauses and a tree of thoughts that may all end up being bretty much irrelevant to finishing the sentence. But I couldn't have known that for sure before thinking them through. I'm a slow writer, which is part of the reason why I don't write as much as I did when I worked less hours. For a long time though I didn't realise that writing it itself can be a recreational activity and that the very reason why I write so slowly is something that can help me in my life. Granted, with a topic like this, I'm not getting much therapeutic value out of it. It's mainly throttling my perfectionist-like attitude on forming sentences that slows me down, as well as dismissing thoughts that I eventually regard as not belonging in the entry. But who knows what some of those thoughts can do in the future. Having had them once may help me make the right connection in a completely different situation some day. But when writing a diary, forcing yourself to think about things can do a lot to set you onto a track to improve your life.

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