Ten-Finger Exercises

Three puzzle pieces: do they fit at all?

The first quote I ran into today that interested me was when I was looking up 'teleology' in the Wikipedia.

"The view of philosophical naturalism is that man sees because he has eyes. Teleology, on the other hand, holds both that man sees because he has eyes and has eyes so that he can see. As Aristotle wrote in support of teleology, "Nature adapts the organ to the function, and not the function to the organ." Lucretius replied in support of philosophical naturalism: "Nothing in the body is made in order that we may use it. What happens to exist is the cause of its use."

Later, I read a quote that Wind in My Wings had in the Spiritual Newsletter that reminded me of the ones above. "You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you've got something to say." F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then, in response to the question, "Why do you write?" I wrote the following.

Why Do I Write?

In the past my answer to this question has frequently been because the material itself begged to be documented. Sometimes that meant opening the scene to other sets of eyes. Often it meant focusing on a situation, or my feelings about it, in such a way that I could see objectively, a form of sacramentalizing it.

The irony of a situation often called to me. A patient fights for life in one bed of the ICU, and in the next is someone who tried to end his.

The feelings of missing someone that can be described by the details of missing folding clean white underwear—that intrigues me. Life is in the details: the grieving husband whose cry was, "What do I do about her teeth? They aren't even paid for yet."

But why I write isn't just because there's content crying out to be heard. I write because I like the me who writes. I like the high I get when something good comes out, when funny or painful words roll out in waves. When the surf is up, I want to be in it. When it isn't, I still like paddling around. It feels like my natural element.