Why I Started Writing

💭 I am not a writer. I spent fifteen years building websites, and I now spend my working hours on a flight deck. Nobody trained me to put sentences together, and for most of my life I didn't. Especially in English, which is my second language. Yet most days now, I sit down and write. Not because anyone is paying me to, and not because I imagine the world is waiting for my thoughts. I write because of what it does to the inside of my head.

It started as an experiment — thirty days, one short piece a day, to see if I could. I expected it to be a chore I would be glad to finish. Instead it became the part of the day I protect. Somewhere in those first weeks I noticed that writing is a reliable tool I have for thinking clearly and it makes me a little sharper each time. And, the part I did not see coming, it connects me to people. Four things, from one quiet habit. And every one of them, aviation had taught me to value long before I ever valued it on the page.

The page layout is my instrument scan

My mind is a busy place. I have a light, inattentive form of ADHD, which means my attention is forever being tugged somewhere else. Tomorrow's roster, a half-finished conversation, a concern with a solution yet to come. Sitting still and "clearing my mind" has never worked for me. Telling a mind like mine to think about nothing is like telling it to itch less. The harder you try, the louder it gets.

Writing does the opposite, and that is exactly why it works. It hands my attention one thing to hold: the sentence I am building right now. Every time my thoughts drift off, the sobriety of my text editor quietly reels them back in. Notice, return; notice, return… I am giving it a single lane to run in, and a mind with one lane is a calm mind.

This is the same trick I run at altitude. A pilot's eyes never stop moving across the instruments — speed, attitude, altitude, vertical speed, and reverse — an endless loop I can easily hold for eight hours at a stretch without once feeling bored. We call that the scan. It took me years to understand that the scan is a form of meditation, and that I had been practising attention training my entire flying career without ever giving it that name. — 🔗 read more

The text editor is my scan on the ground. It's always on my computer. I find it challenging to write anything meaningful with a pen and paper. When I write, the same part of me that stays quiet and steady in the cockpit switches on. It is close to the whole point.

Writing is a debrief of my own thinking

Here is something I have learned the hard way: I do not actually have a mental clarity on anything important until I try to write it down.

In my head, an idea can feel finished. Clever, even. The moment I put it on the page, half of it falls apart in my hands. Writing is merciless that way, and I have come to love it for that. It takes the warm, comfortable feeling of I sort of understand this and forces it to become here is precisely what I mean, so anyone can follow it and not get lost. A lot of what drifts around in my mind is noise. Writing is how I find the core thought buried inside it.

Aviation has a name for this discipline. After every flight that matters, we debrief. We go back over what happened, extract what was important, and lift out the one or two lessons worth carrying forward. It's usually no more than a few seconds to a couple of minutes. Skip the debrief and a hard day is just a bad memory that fades. Run the debrief and that same day becomes something you can actually use the next time the pressure is on. — 🔗 read more

That is what a page does for a mind. I sit down with a raw heap of half-thoughts and I get up with a shorter, cleaner set of things I genuinely believe. The valuable part I keep. The rest, I get to throw away feeling lighter. Even if no one ever read a word of it, this alone would be reason enough to keep the habit.

It works like training, not like talent

For a long time I believed writing was a talent and it definitely is for some people — something you were handed at birth or not at all. I was certain I had not been. That belief is a very convenient excuse to avoid the effort.

Writing behaves like fitness. The first sessions are awkward and faintly painful. You are slow, you are clumsy, and there is nothing worth showing anyone at the end. But you keep turning up, and something develops without announcing itself. The sentences come a little easier. You begin to enjoy the effort itself and then, the part that genuinely surprised me, you start wanting to get better, chasing the improvement for its own sake. Writing is the same as going to the gym. The more I do it, the more I want to, and the better I get. It is the same in my triathlon journey — the swim gets more natural, the bike feels faster and the run feels smoother.

Pilots live and breathe this distinction. Being current means you have done the bare minimum lately to stay legal. Being proficient means you are actually good at the job — and proficiency only ever comes from the reps nobody forced you to do. Two pilots can hold the identical licence and be worlds apart in the seat, and the gap between them is not talent. It is the quiet, unglamorous, repeated work that no one is watching. — 🔗 read more

A daily page is not glamorous either. But it is the training load that, over a short amount of time, turns I can't really write into I write most days, and I would miss it if I stopped.

And then, the best part: someone writes back

I could stop there. Calmer, clearer, and a little sharper each week would already be a satisfying return on one small habit. But the real reason I keep going is the part I never predicted.

Writing lets me reach people. The ones I love, some of them a long way away, and the ones I have never met who are simply willing to spend a few minutes with what is on my mind. When something I have written lands, when someone replies, pushes back, tells me it helped, or hands me the piece I was missing, a loop closes. That exchange has quietly become one of the true pleasures of my life right now, and I do not say that lightly.

And it is a loop, not a broadcast. In the cockpit, a message is not considered sent until it has been received and read back to confirm it arrived intact. I get your clearance; I repeat it back to you; only then do we both know, for certain, that we are on the same page. Communication was never one person talking into the air. It is the confirmation coming home. — 🔗 read more

Writing works exactly like that. The words leave me, but they are not finished until they reach someone and something comes back the other way. The feedback is not a pleasant bonus sitting on top of the writing. It is the other side of the writing. Without the return leg, I am just talking to myself with better punctuation.

☝🏼 So that is why I write. Not because I am a writer — I am not, and not because I was handed a gift — I was not. I write because it calms the noise in my head, clears my thinking until I can see what I actually believe, compounds like any honest training. And, best of all, it connects me to people through a loop that only closes when they answer. You do not need talent to begin. You need a desire to clarify something and a few reps. Turn up for those, and the calm, the clarity, the craft, and the connection all arrive on their own. They have been waiting for you to sit down.