Hockey Gloves and Oyster Shells.

If you wish to become an expert on the game of hockey, you would familiarize yourself with the game, and if you wanted to master it, you would practice every single day until you became proficient at it. Writing is different, because these steps of logical self improvement don’t work.  You can examine the great literary works of history, but it doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to replicate their success. The content has to be something original that comes from deep within yourself, but neither can it be so abstract that it alienates your audience.

Anyone can write anything at any given time, but it doesn’t change the reality that it’s impossible to create something out of nothing. The problem is that the more that you read the more likely you are to repeat the ideas and structures that have become familiar to you. I could continue to whine and complain, but it wouldn’t come anywhere close to matching the languid soliloquies of our good friend Sydney Carton; so I might as well quit while I’m ahead.

I’m currently reading the biography of Howard Hughes. The telephone hadn’t been invented yet, so people communicated with each other via telegram.  It’s not hard to see how easily the intended message could have been misinterpreted.  The most humorous of these incidents that had unintentional results are recorded in the book.  - You would think the advent of the telephone would have helped to minimize those errors… but no, nearly 100 years later our preferred methods of communication are limited to 100 characters of text or less.

My point isn’t so much that history is doomed to repeat itself, but rather to illustrate our swiftness to dispose of reason and to replace it with cacophonous revelries. We somehow think that we are more human than our predecessors. Yet, we traffic children, harvest organs, and find ourselves enslaved to many of the very same vices. 

The term self-protectionism technically doesn’t exist, but I think that perhaps it should. We isolate the outcasts of society, and prefer to be indifferent, because it allows us to maintain our comfortable lifestyles. That’s not to say that compassion isn’t being shown anymore, but I’m convinced that we have an obligation to do a better job of going out of our way when no one else will.

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Proverbs 31:8  Open your mouth for those who can’t speak for themselves. Defend the rights of the afflicted and needy.

Romans 12:16 Get along with each other; don’t be stuck up. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody. - Mother Teresa