WHY I STARTED WRITING

When asked why I decided to write, my knee jerk response would be why not? However, the analytical side of me wants to explore the not-so-bright part of my brain that is actively encouraging me to document part of my, very much, mundane life. For the people reading that don’t know me very well or just happened to stumble on this page, I want to apologize in advance for the plethora of The Office references which is what I am fundamentally built on, as one of my friends would put it. To add to this, the focus of my posts are not for motivation, so if you are reading this with the intent of finding some sort of light to drive you or the means to fill an existing void, then you are probably looking in the wrong place. With that in mind, hopefully, you do find my experiences insightful and worth the read. My posts will largely be personal and I hope to share all my experiences, for regardless of whether they were blessings or valuable experiences that did not immediately present themselves, they helped to shape me as an individual. Lastly, I want my blog to act as an unconfined space on the Internet where I can freely write about, well, anything that comes to mind.

Let us start with a brief biography about myself; I am a Bachelors of Science graduate from the University of British Columbia with a focus in computer science and am based in Vancouver, Canada. I am an avid hiker during the summer and watch The Office religiously, hence the occasional references. Another point that I can share about myself is that I was fortunate enough to be able to find an area of study (i.e. computer science) which I thoroughly enjoy. That being said, it honestly wasn’t a clear path to begin with and even when I decided with computer science, there were quite a few hurdles to overcome. I will probably expand further on the ins and outs of the reasons I decided to partake in my software development journey in a post or a portion of a post to come.

The result of me pursuing computer science has resulted in me to take on a more structured approach to thinking about problems and while this has been rewarding in many aspects, one of the spaces I no longer found myself in was creative writing. This is not to say that programming lacks a creative side, as there are multiple solutions to a single problem and many developers tackle problems in a different manner. However, I missed the freedom of having my mind sporadically run off on a tangent. In other words, I wasn’t able to find the type of freedom in my everyday activities that creative writing allows for. While structured approaches and logic are great for reasoning and explaining problems as one can map out points from A to B and from B to C, I believe there is a creative outlet in writing that can’t be tapped from logic.

Another reason I decided to write after much consideration is that I wanted to leave a digital footprint that I can look back on when feeling nostalgic. One of the cruel realities of life is not being wired to remember all the highlights of our lives. While technologies such as the camera or video recorder have given us the ability to capture these moments in real time, there are periods in our lives where it would be inappropriate to use such technologies (e.g. movie theater). Moreover, I believe that even when the moments are appropriate to capture through technology, writing can simply act as an extension to these captured memories. Writing allows for the time to collect thoughts and emotions to reflect on specific moments in time. Lastly, I once was a firm believer in not capturing moments with photos or videos as I didn’t think you were seizing the moment with the presence of your phone. Nonetheless, after realizing that our brains are not structured to remember every immaculate detail of an experience, it makes logical sense to capture at least part of the experience prior to putting the technologies away.

The idea of primal instinct suggests that humans, as a species, are motivated by self-preservation and survival which complies with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The reason I bring this up is that I believe that it is an instinct to want to protect yourself, an instinct to want to be cherished, and an instinct to want to compete. To accentuate my point, when we look at natural selection, we can see there are many animals with cannibalistic tendencies and this can be seen as basic competition. Now, fortunately for us, the majority of animals and humans in contemporary society have evolved to not compete to this extent as somewhere along the way, we learned about compassion. Having said all that, I do believe that humans, when pushed to extremes, can and will release their buried anger in forms of hostility. This is why we have hobbies, loved ones, and other forms of stress relievers to suppress this innate behavior. I know I did run off on a tangent there, but I guess what I want to say is one of the reasons for the creation of this blog is to allow my mind to wander and release the stresses that come with ordinary, everyday living. I hope that answers why I am writing and if it still doesn’t, my response would again be, why not?

Thank you for reading about a very ordinary post from my very ordinary life. Feel free to leave suggestions for what topics you want me to cover or things I could improve on as any constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully this post urges you to find a passion or hobby that takes away the stresses of everyday living and helps you to realize that it is quite alright to be ordinary. As Pam would say, “there’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that the point?”