Why Write

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My* Because

I saw a bulletin board titled, “My Why”, which showcased all the reasons why the employees in the building did what they did. After overthinking it a few hours, I thought, “Shouldn’t it be, ‘My Because?’’’ ‘Why?’ is the question, ‘because’ is the answer you are sharing with the world, it is your reason, your answer to the question “Why?” 

Fast forward a year or so and a co-worker expressed how she preferred a certain online platform because, unlike another social online platform, it didn’t showcase peoples’ “perfect lives, perfect kids and perfect trips.”

After a bout of self-reflection, I had to admit, by posting my travel blog on the social platform, I was a little guilty of showing only the happy-shiny. (Although, if anyone has read them all, they will find tales of conflict, fear, confusion, distress, illness and chronic near-hypothermia.) 

All of this led me to examine my motives, “Why do I post my travel blog?” 

In short, because it is, right now, the only practical outlet and available focus of my writing. 

But, why write? Why breath?

My desire to write and to learn how to think clearly comes from a deep lack of ability to express myself. From my early childhood of selective mutism, to my school-days of almost-pathological shyness, I have been trying to understand the world and be understood in it. I write to learn how to think and to order my thoughts and reactions to the world. 

“….here is the real value of teaching everybody, everybody, to write clear, coherent, and more or less conventional prose: The words we write demand far more attention than those we speak. The habit of writing exposes us to that demand, and skill in writing makes us able to pay logical and thoughtful attention. Having done that, we can come to understand what before we could only recite. We may find it bunk or wisdom, but while we had better reject the bunk, we can accept the wisdom as truly our own rather than some random suggestion of popular belief.“– Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe, pg. 29 Little, Brown and Co., Boston

I write to think, I think so I can determine if something is “bunk or wisdom.” I write to think, but I also write so I can better speak more precisely.

The best thing you can do is to teach people to write, ‘cause there’s no difference between that and thinking. And one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something. …You need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world. Thinking makes you win the battles you undertake, and those could be battles for good things. If you can think and speak and write, you are absolutely deadly, nothing can get in your way. So, that’s why you learn to write.” –Better Chapter. (2021, May 30). Jordan Peterson-How to Outsmart Everyone Else [Video].YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td0GqMp0CSE

Like Flannery O’Connor, I also use writing as my mental scratch paper, to untangle entwined and harried thoughts, to think things through, to plan, to ponder. 

I’m not good at it. But I persist because even though one is breathing badly, one shouldn’t stop breathing. 

Along with tomes of fiction and nonfiction tucked in boxes and cabinets, I also carry a tiny spark of hope that someday I will get published–not self-published, but really published, if only I keep practicing, keep polishing, keep creating. And these blogs, because I don’t have a fictional world brewing in my mind at the moment, are something I can practice with. 

Lacking a fictional world, I must write about the real one.

I do apologize if my travel blogs incite jealousy or envy. I am genuinely sorry, because I do sometimes have the same reaction to my friends’ posts, and then after some self-reflection, I rejoice in their joy. (Except when people post Florida pics … you can have Florida-it’s a very nice state with premier attractions-but it will never be my first choice.)

Travel is more than shiny happy people photo-ops. It is wonder, ever-present opportunities to learn (even if it is sitting in the car for hours, watching the changing landscape fly by and wondering at the underlying geology), it is challenges to overcome, family time and discovery, observations to make and ponder as I continue to try to understand my world and the people who populate it, including myself. 

My because? Because my blogs are practice. Because travel is a stand-in for creativity.

*Every so often, especially in prologues and introductions, Astrid will revert to writing in the first person point-of-view. She doesn’t prefer to use the first person often, because it seems overly self-involved, and carries an authority–“I think … I know … I do, I, I, I …”–which she does not deserve to convey. Also, it is because, as mentioned in the Out of Myself I Go: Prologue, she does not like to be confined to the inside of her head for very long.