Last Sunday morning, I was sitting on the sofa in my parent's living room. Before me on the tea table was a worn journal of thin and discolored pages. It was my grandfather's journal and now belongs to my father. My grandfather had passed away in the months leading up to my birth. I never got to visit the places he had frequented and the people who had been a part of his life's journey.
I was now about to enter his world, through the words he had left behind. Within minutes, I was captivated by the power of the written words. In the magical script before me, I was transported to another age when food was an everyday art, planned, prepared and enjoyed in the company of others, and a time when people had the heart to pause their own lives to embrace each other's struggles. All this was conveyed to me in the beauty of the words that flowed together to connect with the writer's mind and understand the world they lived in.
That kind of writing seems to be lost on us today. We have gotten used to writing in bite-sized pieces for a public looking for entertainment, and hungry for information. No wonder, there are nearly
200 million bloggers on the Internet and a new blog is created somewhere in the world every half a second. Instead of adding to our collective wisdom, most of these writings reflect the superficiality(肤 浅) and impatience of our day and age.
This not only robs us of the skill of writing impressive essays, it also prevents us from exploring what is indeed important. Writing humbles us in a way that is vital for our character growth, by reminding us about the limits of the self and our appropriate place in the vast flow of life.
Writing frees us by helping us explore the unknown so that we really open up to the magic of the world around us. I saw all of this in the writing of my grandfather. And I've seen it again and again in the writings of the greatest thinkers of humanity. Their writing reflects deep thought on issues of human importance.