Writing as making signs.

A pen, carefully dragged on paper, with the tip side touching the surface, leaves traces of your arm’s movement. Different shades of blue, of black, of red, of any color your want, accumulate on the spongy material by forming tracks. It’s a repetition of dance moves. Not casual. But never equals. Not unique. But always changing. Curves, straight lines, dots, dashes. Writing with a pen, ink, and paper is a physical gesture. You can perceive the activity by looking at the body. Somebody is marking, sometimes forever, an object. Not to make it their own but to express their thoughts.

Writing as expressing your thoughts

If you stop for a moment and listen to your mind’s voice reading these words, you realize living one of the most intimate experiences a human being can have. Listening to their thoughts. The evolution’s power equipped you with such powerful tools to decode signals captured with your eyes. Where any other living creature would see spots of inks or dark blinking squares, we see the message conveyed by somebody. Thinking and expressing our thoughts is what makes us uniquely human. It’s a magical experience that makes us alive, individuals, persons. The physical act of writing could be seen as the translation of our thoughts. IT’s usually mechanic, and while we refer to the act of writing as effortful, sometimes hard or impossible, difficult, actually we are referring to the act of expressing our thoughts.

Writing is not writing.

That is why I think that writing it’s not just writing. It’s the complex, intimate, and personal process of collecting and developing our thoughts to put them in a tangible form that humankind can decode.

Writing is just one of the means to express ourselves. Art, music, singing, sculpting, dancing, any other activity generated by our feelings and our thoughts is what makes us alive and communicate.

Sometimes writing is not writing.

It’s life.