One of the biggest things I have learned in my writing class was the very first day I walked in. After the whole class had been seated, our professor began to talk about the importance of writing. Following a small exploratory discussion on why writing is important, my professor stated that "we come to understand life through writing." Immediately, I raced to write that profound statement down in my notebook. I had never thought about writing that way before.
As I worked on my essays and completed my course readings for the class, my mind continued to travel back to that small statement. We understand life through writing. I couldn't help but agree that the statement was true. After all, I had always felt like I was figuring something out during the writing process. But my question was why. Why does writing bring understanding? If you're writing down your own thoughts and feelings, how does that help you understand them better than if they were just in your mind?
Unable to come to a conclusion for my question, I simply continued to write. Slowly, bit by bit, it dawned on me. Writing helps us understand our lives because it is a form of exploration. By writing down our feelings and thoughts, we open new doors of topics to explore almost immediately. Through attempting to get a message across to others, one must learn a great deal about that topic and then put it in their own words. It encourages thinking outside of the box and being creative. Writing involves making sense of the small details. It involves picking up the bits and pieces and making sense out of them.
As we write, we are able to come to realize how things work together, what is important, and how to use those to bring understanding to ourselves and others. It is not only understanding what to write, but more importantly how to make it make sense by exploring why things are the way they are.
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