Writing is a superpower. Writing by hand produces a deep engagement. Typing is a miracle of efficiency. Recording videos and voice clips can also be thought of as a form of writing.

But writing in the sense that is being done here on the page…is special.

Writing broadly speaking can be defined as the organization of thought, the cataloguing of experience, and the engine of idea generation.

It may be a phenomenon peculiar to me. Or to people like me.

Those who by temperament and upbringing place high value on reading and writing.

But I feel that one does not have the full range of human experience if one neglects the practice of writing.

To fully honor the peculiar machinery of Homo Sapiens is to put it through its paces. We can in my opinion be described as memory machines. This is not a reductionist take being proposed but rather an angle that elucidates Geist.

A human life can be thought of as limit defined unfolding. Or more poetically blossoming.

We are limited by time, by geography, by upbringing, by culture, genes, etc.

These things create the basic unit known as individual who through experience expands into the peculiarities of personality.

This blossoming is profoundly and particularly fostered by the complementary soils of reading and writing.

Why is this so?

Language.

Mathematics is called the universal language but there is much more qualia to the human experience than the quantitative business of ‘maths.’

Music or audible ‘maths’ adds a touch of qualia and gets closer to essential humanity by being a profoundly temporal thing. In simpler terms..in honoring time…through only being intelligible in time…music gets closer to essential Geist.

Pictorial representation, paintings, and the moving pictures known as films are more closely akin to the Episodic operations of Geist. Even in a still painting the passage of time is implicit and there is an idea capture of vast arrays of qualia. Again, I must simplify…Pictures are worth a thousand words.

But a thousand words are how you see the picture.

That is why language is so peculiarly crucial to humanity to spirit.

It is simultaneously bound by time and transcendent of time.

We are playing with the idea that human life can be thought of as limit defined unfolding.

Can you see how the pieces fit?

How perhaps this is why there exists the verse ‘In the Beginning was the Word’?

Both in time and out of time is language. A single word, or phrase, can link experiences broad enough to be shared by a nation and specific enough to the singular time bound locutions of the individual.

That is why writing is a superpower.

Writing or the cultivation of language is indispensable to a fulfilled human experience.

The richer your storehouse of words of individually experienced glimpses of collectively accrued insights of essential truths the greater is your capacity for ideas, engagement, sorrow joy…experience.

That is why it is so lamentable that we’ve so pedestalized simplicity that discussions of a literacy crisis have begun.

Pithy, business friendly, efficient means of expression have their places. But pithy, business friendly, efficient means barely scratch the surface of human experience.

We needlessly impoverish ourselves and our societies with this insistence on simplification.

This simplification does not simplify. It does not make us more folksy, approachable, intelligible, humble, or efficient.

This is profoundly evident in the fact that our national discourse, our films, books, musics, and personal interactions have suffered.

A suffering often manifesting itself as awkwardness, angst, and pale imitations in the form of nostalgia and remakes.

This is by no means an elitist screed. There is much to be said for oral traditions, for the simple experience of merely living, for the profound insights that unlettered men and women can and do bring into the lives of their families, friends, and societies.

But writing does exist. And simply because we have good folksy wisdom filled people, pithy entertainers, and terse thrillers doesn’t mean we can’t…have…that we don’t absolutely need MORE.

More exists…whether or not we choose to engage with more is up to us on both the individual and societal level.

Considering that we are memory machines I’d suggest we do more engaging.

If you find the description of memory machines dubious then consider the aforementioned popularity of nostalgia and remakes.

We iterate our way through memories…that is how our spirit…our Geist operates.

‘Do this in the remembrance of me.’ Said Christ.

There is a reason that so many of the things we hold most profound make mention of memory.

Memory is integral to our humanity.

Language is the thing that makes memory, intelligible,communicable and ripe for harvest.

Writing is the deep, physical, and spiritual practice of language.

That is why writing is a superpower.

It is a superpower that many of us have, some of us must get, and all of us must exercise!