Having just finished Jack Kerouac’s book, Dharma Bums, I moved to the next book on the shelf, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. Both books provide a picture of zen practice in daily life, and Pirsig credits Kerouac as having a strong influence on his writing and thinking.

At the beginning of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there is a passage in which Pirsig captures succinctly why I have begun this website:

What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get a chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and I know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seems important.

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua — that’s the only name I can think of for it — like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts to the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me that the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks.

In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into the old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. “What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. 

There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and “best” was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

I think this passage summarizes my intent for this site.

In just one short month, the experience of putting down thoughts — attempting to deepen the channel — on things that I thing are important has been very rewarding for me. I am so grateful for the words of encouragement that many people have provided on this site, on FaceBook and LinkedIn.

I stole the “Why I Write” blog title from George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay. I have been writing for many years but I’ll never forget my first experience with being edited. I was in junior high school and my English teacher, Kirby Lee, marked up something I had written. As a teenager, I was fairly convinced my writing was flawless and without peer, so red ink on my paper was not a welcome sight.

But as I reviewed his edits, I realized he had not just made comments in the margins; he had used his red pen to excise my superfluous words, leaving behind a much clearer message. At that moment, I realized the truth of what I would read later in William Zinsser’s classic book, On Writing Well, “‘Rewriting is the essence of writing.”

And it was also Zinsser who later wrote in his enlightening book, Writing to Learn, that it is only through putting pen to paper — or fingers to keyboard — that we clarify what we think about an issue. The act of trying to make a point in writing forces us to crystalize our thinking.

Or, in short, you don’t know it until you try to write it.

Let me extend the offer to you to contribute to this website. You don’t have to sign on as an indentured servant for the rest of your natural life. You can share your thoughts randomly, sporadically or as frequently as you want.

As Isaac Asimov once said, “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” Help yourself clarify your thinking on issues you’re facing, thoughts you’re having.

And help me deepen the channel.