Writing things down to create more inner order

Part of the point of this blog, is to put the things that I’m struggling into words. And I hope to do it in a way that others can learn from as well. I’m not the first person to realise that when you put your problems, struggles and your inner life in general into words, everything becomes easier to manage. If we look inside ourselves for just a little while, we will, at least if we are like most people, find that it is rather messy. We have a lot of half-digested opinions and beliefs and ideas about how the world and other people work. We have a few poorly defined goals and aspirations. We have made assumptions and arbitrarily chosen to believe some people over others. And to top it all off, all of this is in there in the form of an incoherent mess of words, sounds and mental images, that not seldom contradict each other.

This mess, in all its brokenness, can be quite elaborate, while we ignore such very basic and simple things, such as how we breathe, that we can never stop thinking (if we are like most people) or how our thoughts actually seem to work.

Writing down stuff about our lives, preferably on a daily basis, helps us to put things into perspective. We become more aware of our state and what it entails on both a collective and a personal level. We become more aware of which issues we share with other people, and which issues are personal to ourselves. And what unique shape the shared issues take in our own lives. In short, writing things down help us to put our inner lives in order.