Writing

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

E.M Forster had it right (or write?).

If I want to assess the quality of my beliefs, if I want to see what I think in order to measure it, I must write.

Writing takes my ideas and places them away from myself for objective observation.

I know who and what I am when I write what is important to me and look at it outside of myself on paper or screen. It is a sobering, reflective experience that removes my thought from a maelstrom of stimuli vying for attention, and it separates the wheat of thought from its chaff.

It also cements my identity -- or at least the better parts of my identity. It focuses me on my core values and affirms them.

Writing helps to understand the world and one's place in it. With competing demands and responsibilities tugging at each of our limbs, physical, mental, emotional -- it reminds of the priorities of self, of the direction one's essential identity ought to navigate as it makes its way through increasingly complicated experience.

Writing enables a person to embrace the best parts of identity and to throw away accumulated contamination. Extravagant, untested, and unsupported ideas are naked in print, deprived of internal trappings and biases.

Writing is thought externalized from the thinker. It is how ideas are examined and refined. It is a defense against the onslaught of ideation others would impose.

See this for an interesting essay about writing, which, among other things, suggests it leads to greater happiness.

Escher was on to something beyond illustration when he showed how a drawing implement, like a writing one, can help us picture ourselves.