Reading time: 2.11

Hey Reader,

It’s weird, what happens when we set out to write Something Important, like a book or an essay or even a social media post.

Our bodies and minds are taken over by the ghost of our primary school selves, worried the teacher will take the ideas our imaginations made and squash them into a boring little cube that fits the system.

And instead of writing something real, we write something correct.

Or we try to.

But what comes out is cold and sterile, if anything comes out at all.

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to write something big and clever. To go viral. To compete with that influencer whose most inane posts get liked and shared and reshared thousands of times.

We bust a gut to come up with the unique idea that nobody else has ever thought of in the entire history of the world…

And we forget about the human we’re writing for.

We forget the little pieces of our humanity that make up the days of our lives.

The moments we dismiss as unimportant, even as they lodge in our brains.

The light in golden hour, the primroses on the hillside, the smile on your beloved’s face, the server in the hiking shop who reminds you of nobody more than Rowan Atkinson’s character in Love, Actually as they wrap your purchase incredibly s l o w l y even though your movie is about to start in the cinema down the road.

We forget to write about the conversation that made us laugh, the chance meeting that lit up our day, the absolute rage induced by poor hand-dryer placement for short people, the poo that wouldn’t flush on a first date, the story that made us cry.

All these experiences are personal and they’re also universal.

They connect you to me to the random reader on LinkedIn to the person in the bookshop.

They’re magic.

Today, I would like to suggest this.

If you’re having trouble with your words, if your ambition is getting in the way of your action and the world feels too heavy for anything less than Nobel-worthy prose, I want to remind you that everything is made of tiny human moments and nothing can be more important than those because the tiny moments of humanity are where everything begins, and they’re where we can begin to build something beautiful.

Write about that.

Pick a tiny moment from your day yesterday, and write about it.

Not necessarily for anyone, but I’d also like to suggest this.

Pick up a pen and a postcard or a piece of paper and write a little note. A like-note. To someone you care about or love or like or admire.

Write it, even if it’s about nothing much, and tell them how great you think they are.

Then put a stamp on it and send it and you’ll pull them away from the cares of the world for just a moment and make them smile because they know you’re thinking of them.

And you’ll have written something that changed the world.

TTFN,

Vicky