Long time reader, First time Writer

I'd like to share with you something interesting that happened to me recently.


I awoke from as restless night alone not long ago to do my necessary business and hopefully return to sleep. However upon my return to a bed comfortably sized for two, yet slightly lonely for one, I found myself still pondering the day and I decided that since my wheels wouldn't stop turning I'd take some time to write some stuff down. Several people had recently encouraged me lately to "write it down" and besides I had already done a lot of reading before I went to bed the first time. I thought that writing might bring me the same sort of relaxing calm feeling that reading usually gives me, I imagined myself asleep in no time.

Writing for me up to this point had always been a sort of chore, an apology, a list, a short message and on the most annoying of occasions, a report for school or work. Something was different about tonight, something overflowed. A switch covered in cobwebs in a dark corner of a room rarely visited was flipped. I WROTE! I wrote to no one and everyone at the same time I wrote to myself but from a perspective outside of myself, I just wrote. Somehow I had freed myself from the box I had been placed in as a young child in school, I didn't have to have a thesis statement or a subject or a plot at all, I could just write! I began to whip my pen rapidly describing the occurrences of the previous day and my thoughts about each of them in what I thought was such brilliant wording if I did say so myself. It was wonderful! I couldn't believe I had never done this before. I had heard about it, people had suggested I do it, and I had spent countless hours fumbling through some of the greatest works of it ever created yet somehow it had eluded me, I had never tried it for myself. Until now. I continued writing until my wrist became sore and the indentation my middle finger where I rest my pen began to ache from the flurry. So I took a break. I felt even more awake than when I had started and now my mind was racing. I decided to return to my book, it was the middle of the night, and I did have a short list of things to do tomorrow.

I opened my book looking for that familiar relaxing feeling and I read...I READ! again I felt I had opened a door I had never been through before. I felt I was really reading for the first time. I realized that this was not just a bank of knowledge to take from in order to better understand my world. It is a work of art! A beautiful thing, a sharing of someones soul through words, an expression of what it is to be human. So I turned back over again, grabbed my pen and paper and began to write about this very experience.

In reading this I expect that the people that understand what I'm trying to say will be writers and readers themselves and they may not understand how I could have gone for so long reading as many books as I have and never writing, or much less understanding what writing is. To help explain myself I'd like to ask, How many of us live our lives like that everyday?

How many of us eat but rarely cook, sing but never dance, teach without also learning, speak but forget to listen.

I'm so glad to have finally discovered writing even after such a long existence without it, and I'm glad it worked out this way and provided me an opportunity to examine my own life and the balances that exist within it.

<3

Avery