I wanted to build on and layer upon what @melakovacs said in her recent post:

I write because I want to make sense of my experiences. Writing helps me to connect my experiences with stuff I’ve read or heard or experienced before.

By writing I can build upon ideas in my head and see them more clearly.

On the one hand, I write to share what I learn along the way. Who knows, maybe somebody needs to hear exactly this, at the time when they find it, in the way I’ve written it.

On the other hand, the process of writing teaches me.

“Writing teaches me……” WOW. 

What a great way of putting it. This resonated deeply for me, because that’s exactly how and why I write. I write for my writings to teach me back. 

My words are my teachers. They come through me, not from me. Oftentimes, the meaning and lessons are emergent from the writing; a lovely consequence and side-effect, rather than the lessons driving the writing. 

And once they manifest, they stay there—on parchment or pixels—silent and immutable in their power. Just awaiting patiently for the next time they can teach me again, when I re-read them again by chance or intention. Always there to remind me; tease me; grill me of past lessons of pain that I really should have learned by now. Though of course, also pinky-promising a beautiful future to come.

My words are my teachers. The lessons they hold are bequeathed to me, not borne from me.  Writing daily is a gift, not a chore (OK sometimes it’s a chore, but you get what I mean…). 

It’s the proverbial gift that keeps giving, and most of the old-timers here with their impossibly long streaks can attest to that. I’d never kept up a continuous, unbroken streak on anything for this long, and never have I benefited this much from something this deceptively mundane too! I mean, it’s just two hundred words! What power does a mere two hundred scribbles hold? Yet, what power does a drop of water have over stone, when dripped drop by drop over months and years? Water punches through rock, by sheer determination, consistency and patience. Likewise, our daily words here punch through the walls that exist in our minds and lives, by the same qualities.

Writing teaches me.