Writing as a Trade to Produce Meaning and Legacy

Calling Writing a Trade

I have long stopped romanticizing writing and have started calling it what it is: a trade. It is not my pastime, nor a personality trait, but a form of labor I am still learning slowly, imperfectly, repetitively. I write at the same desk where I compute my bills, not when inspiration strikes, but when a deadline demands attention. I try to produce meaning not through mood but by discipline.

When I write, I am never working alone. Every sentence I put down is already in conversation with thinkers who came before me. I may not cite them explicitly, but they appear in the questions I always ask, in the tensions that refuse quick resolution, in the metaphors I reach for to ground meaning. From a vast and uneven inheritance: philosophy, theology, oral wisdom, cultural memory, writing becomes less about originality and more about stewardship.

There are questions that do not leave us alone: what gives life meaning? Are we living well? What do we owe one another in fractured times? Philosophers, poets, and elders asked these questions long before I did, often under harsher conditions. They wrote as they thought, arguing, debating, experimenting with ideas. There is no way to outthink them. I live a life that both proves and disproves their theories, yet the questions persist.

Bringing Ideas Down to Earth

Purpose sounds clear in theory, but meaning settles only as the body changes. I notice this as I age: what tires me more quickly, what no longer feels urgent, what I stop worrying about. Writing is where ideas meet these limits. I take what I read in books, scriptures, and theories and test them in daily life: in my kitchen, in the classroom, in marketplaces, and in church. In these settings, writing does not resolve questions; it holds both agreement and doubt. I still have to choose how to live with what I believe, even when writing offers no final answer.

Meaning comes after confusion, after revision, after sitting with a paragraph that will not budge. Uncertainty lasts longer; clarity arrives slowly; fog is almost always the condition. Writing dwells among the unwritable.

When I publish a piece, I am saying: this thought might be useful to someone. Useful enough to steady another person’s thinking, to articulate a feeling, to open space for relation. Writers of the past endured because they were necessary in their time, and they can still be necessary today. Writing carries responsibility.

How we see ourselves and others is shaped by writing. It can flatten complexity or deepen confusion. Each time I choose which ideas to amplify, which metaphors to trust, which narratives to foreground, I struggle with humility, knowing how partial my view is. I remind myself that writing is not about being clever or intelligent, but about allowing others room to think.

Paying Attention as Work

I pay attention to language because words carry history. I pay attention to silence because what remains unsaid can also be written. I pay attention to people because writing must ignore no one. This attention makes haste impossible. Writing becomes slow, deliberate, purposeful.

At times, all of this feels futile. I am more inclined toward anger, toward harsh responses to difficult circumstances, toward immediate gratification. Writing allows a sigh. A pause. A breath. It insists on my staying human. Cynicism is incompatible with writing, though I can write about despair, even my own, and find redemption there.

The ideas I inherit and shape through lived experience remain unfinished. In writing, I join a long attempt to keep meaning in circulation, to prevent it from hardening into dogma or dissolving into noise.

This is my trade. This is my leverage.