#457 Which ideas are worth writing about

If writing and creating every day were as vital to my survival as drinking water, ingesting food, and bonding… What would life look like?

Biologically, all behavior is driven by pain, pleasure, and the triggers and habits that come from repeated reaction to those stimuli.

So I eat because I want to escape the pain of hunger – or heartbreak, sadness, and frustration.

I connect with others because I’m neurologically hardwired to feel pleasure when bonding… and pain and deprivation when I’m abandoned.

Similarly, I write because I want to escape the frustration of not being able to put into words an insight.

I also write because I enjoy the rush resulting from finding the words that convey what I want to say.

I write because I love the tingling in my back and neck when I combine those words into sentences with just the right rhythm, just the right cadence capturing the meaning, context, emotion of what I want to say…

I write because writing wrests the essence from the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions racing through my mind and body.

I write because when when I write, I feel that at last, I can make sense of life.

And the more meaning I find, the more likely I am to write.

When everything is urgent, how do we know what to do first?

One solution is adding more nuance:

What’s the most urgent?

What’s the most important?

Breathing is urgent.

A crying child is urgent.

A toilet visit can be urgent.

Sending that email out tonight right before bed instead of tomorrow, maybe not so much?

Here’s the important question:

If you’re going to prioritize the urgent matters anyway, why stress yourself out by calling everything urgent in the first place?

Making everything urgent devalues truly urgent matters.

Because when everything is urgent, nothing is urgent anymore.