Owls and Orchids

It’s a strange compulsion, this urge to write, especially when you sit down without the vaguest notion of what you are going to write about.  Nevertheless you get your computer out, sit at your desk, or in my case, ensconced in bed and start to ‘write’.  Why, I wonder, do we still refer to it as writing when it most obviously isn’t?  I suppose we have a need to create order and a point of reference.

What happens when the world changes a little more and we no longer need letters, books, or computers to communicate our ideas to each other? When, for example, telepathy rules the day? Will we still have this urge to create using the written word, or will we perhaps have mind controlled computers?  Almost mind-blowing really.

Can you imagine a think tank where everyone is telepathic and ideas are shared at lightning speed? Just thinking about the time gained which can be better utilised to – blog!  Yet that doesn’t really answer the question of why some of us decide to blog.

It’s true that few of us will ever be published authors, yet the urge to write is still there.  Could this be the reason for so many scribblings?  At times I have sat down and typed out my blog, only to find that someone else has written almost the same thing, but managed to publish already. For a while I found that very disturbing, and I wondered if I should publish my work at all. With an established blogger  who has already gathered a following ‘your’ attempt may go completely unnoticed. A writers worst nightmare, to have a ‘published’ work and be largely or totally ignored. Quite a conundrum.

In reality, the urge is a deep desire or need to speak to another person, to communicate your ideas, thoughts, feelings, and hopefully, not just have someone like what you are saying but also to comment on it. It then truly becomes a communication.

Whilst satisfying publishing your blog, is there much rationale behind it if it is unread by anyone else? Receiving a comment about it is an amazing feeling. It means that somehow I have managed to reach another person.  In truth, everything I write is a statement about something which is important to me. So like all writers there is a part of my heart and soul in the words I write.

So, I blog because I care if something I say has a meaning for someone else. It may be that some little thing I’ve written may help someone in some small way, and in a large part it eases the loneliness of being stuck in bed, without the energy to get out and about as I would like. It is my tenuous link to an outside world I feel cut off from.

So I may not be a Pulitzer prize winner, I may never receive any great recognition for what I say, but it is better than losing the ability to think, to communicate and interact with someone ‘out there’. If I can get that message to those who need that lifeline then I would count my blogging a success.

Blog away my friends, we are making history and this may be a lasting record of who and what we were and thought in times to come. I am grateful I can be a part of history in the making and live my life to its fullest learning whatever comes my way until I can get out there and find it for myself.  Even then I will still be blogging – it must be in the blood!

“I tried always to do better: saw always a little further. I tried to stretch myself.”    ― Audrey Hepburn

Being an awesome human being is a part of everyone’s awards in life.