Writing is a struggle. It’s an effort to get ideas from your head onto paper and ultimately into the heads of others, but the only tool at your disposal to tackle this challenge – the communication of nuanced, complex, and abstract ideas to others who live in their own minds and not yours – is the word. That humble string of letters, chosen from a list of 26, must serve to represent the entire range of human emotion, every remembrance of the past, every vision of the future, and every possible way of seeing and interpreting our world. 

The entire range of biological variation on earth can be expressed by a unique combination of 4 nitrogen base pairs in DNA: A, C, T, G. While this is miraculous, somehow the written word seems more daunting. Chemistry is chemistry, but language is inseparable from the mind that generated it. When a person strings together a series of words to represent his thoughts, hopes, dreams, and fears, it is impossible for another person reading those words to fully comprehend the true meaning. Regardless of the skill or clarity of the author, each of our minds has its unique language, and something is always lost in translation. 

And yet, we try. We persist in the struggle, as words are all we have. We are the species that strives to communicate, to concretize the abstract, to disseminate our ideas, and ultimately to bring order to chaos by attempting to find meaning in the written word. We sometimes fail- to capture the essence of complex thought, to clearly represent our point of view, to accurately provide others with a glimpse into the goings on within our minds. But we know the power of words, skillfully wielded. To catalyze a movement, to bring people together, to spread wisdom, to communicate our feelings, to advance civilization. This powerful but imperfect tool is all we have- our great foe, our great blessing. We struggle to write, but we struggle, to write.