About Words, Writing, and Writing Everyday

'Words'  I realise, are the big paradox of my life.  They are one of my greatest strengths and they are also one of my biggest weaknesses.  

Strength because I am able to string a few words together (in English) and make good prose or even better poetry.  I believe that the goodness comes out of my pursuit of writing the truth as I see it. I want my writing to reflect truth.  This has been such a strength that great writing achievements had been expected of me.  However as it happens with many of us sometimes or some of us many times over, an ability not practiced is no ability at all. These days there are flashes of that inherent skill now and then, and a very occasional glimpse of brilliance.  

This ability with words has also wrought disaster, because I have been so careless and thoughtless with the way I have let them loose on all and sundry.  I have hurt people, wrecked relationships and made a battlefield of the world with my words.  In not feeding my strength, I have been letting the weakness grow to gargantuan proportions.  I have allowed the weakness to prevail over and over again, fed and nourished it while my strength languished like an orphan.  

image from www.writebynight.com

Now that I have seen it, I need to feed and nourish the strength; allow it to grow so huge that there is no space for the weakness.  One can strengthen a muscle first and primarily, by exercising it. All else can only be supplementary.  I can nourish my writing essentially by writing, writing every day, and writing all the time.  I will have to write so much that I am able to understand the nuances and intricacies of words, their relationships, spaces and processes so well, that there is no possibility of making a mistake with a word. Or the very least possibility.  

I will have to practice writing every day. I want to do so. I also want to write only the truth.  For writing the truth, my words have got to come from my own experience.  I feel that they have to be so authentic that the examination of truth begins from the question of why I want to write.  However, that line of inquiry is not in the scope of this piece and can be safely set aside for another.  Coming back to writing the truth, and hence writing from experience, I see that most of the time, words fall short of the experience.  They can never communicate the original experience 'accurately' (except perhaps factual information, though I question even this), because when another is reading the words, that becomes his or her subjective process of meaning making from what is being read.  A reader would bring her experience into the process, and lend to it her uniqueness. That which makes you, you and me, me.  And hence now, there are two truths, your truth and my truth.  And my truth can also change over time?  I am remembering Mahatma Gandhi's 'Note to the Reader' in his famous book, Hind Swaraj.  He says in his note that since he is learning all the time and changing, his words about the same topic could change in subsequent writings and hence the reader must always take the latter. This means that truth also is relational. However, that there's got be something that is constant is my gut feeling.  For me now, at the very least, one constant will be that my words not inflict violence on anyone.  Which means any and all truth for me has got to go through the filter of not-being-violent (ahimsa) before it is presented.  

I wondered whether I was getting carried away with this struggle between what is constant and what is relational, and hence distracting myself from writing yet another time. And decided to write about the process.  And my pursuit of writing the truth will include this awareness that truth also is a process. It is relational, and yet there are constants.  The pursuit can only be enhanced by looking at this play of constant and relational aspects of truth given any theme.  And writing about it.