Over the past few years, we’ve gotten to know our president as a lot of different things: campaigner, lawyer, father, basketballer. But what if Obama’s first and truest calling—his desire to write—explains more about him than anything else?
I often wonder why I keep writing this blog. It is somewhat time-consuming. It requires discipline and dedication. Only a few people actually read/follow it and in the age of Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed … writing a blog seems so, so slow and tiresome. But today, I read this interesting article. While it was fascinating to discover how the President came into writing and how he still uses “the writer’s mind” in how he communicates, the more important nugget, I was able to get, was that there is more to writing, in any form, then just putting words to paper. As I see it, writing longer prose or descriptions forces me to think deeper and clarify my thoughts about things I see, hear and experience. While, I may not have an audience to speak of, writing here does force me to consider how another may see or perceive my writing. That forces me to not be lazy in how I express myself. Writing also forces me to interact with language (grammar and spelling) … or to put it more precisely with human communication. So I hope that I will keep writing here and elsewhere. If anything, at least I’ll get an intellectual work out from it. And there can’t be anything wrong with that, can there.
