Write More, Feel Better!

Apparently, having a regular writing routine provides many benefits.

I wasn't actually doing any writing here, but I used my N800 for writing all of the time.

I recently read a blog post called The Psychological Benefits of Writing. This post discusses expressive writing. That is the process of jotting down what you feel and think. This can range from notes to blog posts to working on the next chapter in your book.

If you get your thoughts put down, you don't lose them.  It sounds obvious, but I can't count the number of times that I've had what I thought to be great ideas - then life happened and I totally forgot about them. This is kind of sad really, because I have carried electronic devices on me for very many years.  Even if I couldn't take the time to jot the thoughts down when I actually had them, I could have used the voice recording function to remind myself of what I was thinking about and then gotten around to writing it down later.

The article touches on how writing can help with:

• happiness
• communicating clearly
• handling hard times
• gratitude
• your “mental tabs” (think "having too many tabs open in your browser")
• learning
• leadership

Visit Gregory Ciotti's post at Helpscout.net, it's worth it: The Psychological Benefits of Writing.

To all the authors I've loved or hated, "Thank you."

Thank you

I wonder sometimes what it means when I say that I love to read?

Does it mean that I only want to be entertained by someone, and then discard them and their work without a word of thanks?

There are a number of authors that have influenced and inspired me over the years.  People who have taught me things that I otherwise never would have known, or even thought to consider. Yet I never made an effort to thank them. Of course, many of them were long gone even before my mother and father spent that night on the riverbank near Charlotte, North Carolina.  However, there are others that I could have contacted and expressed my appreciation to at the time, yet they too are gone now.

I'm thinking about this because I'm completing one of my periodic re-readings of the essays of the physician and researcher Lewis Thomas, specifically: The Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail, and Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. It occurred to me as I was reading that I didn't even know whether he was still alive; although I was pretty sure that I'd noted his passing many years ago.  I checked online afterwards, and found that he died in 1993.  That makes me sad.

It makes me sad because everywhere I look today, people are complaining and screaming about how awful everyone else is.  Very few people want to think about the intrinsic beauty that can be found in a myriad of items all around them, including the people that they encounter in the course of their lives on a daily basis.  So yeah, it makes me sad because I look at our own (yes, mine too) bad examples and cringe internally. It makes me sad because I remember how much hope I had growing up, how essays like those moved me and made me want to do whatever little part I could to help improve the world; and I have done some things, things that only I'll ever be aware of, but I wish that I had done more.  Mostly though, it saddens me because I never took the five minutes to write to Mr. Thomas, or any of the others, to tell them how much they had moved, improved, and inspired me.

Too late now, but I'm sorry Mr. Thomas... ...and thanks for everything.