Writing is hard.  The idea of even creating an essay on any particular subject is both daunting and frightening.  Do I know my audience?  Will they agree with me when I do put my ideas on paper?  Does a writer write for an audience or for him/herself?  Perhaps an even more basic question is why write at all?  Yet even pre-historic or rupestrian man had the instinct to record his thoughts on the walls of caves over twenty-five thousand years ago.  The Aztecs had an elaborate writing system that anthropologists have been struggling with for decades.  Humans seem hard-wired for recording their deeds, their acts, their tragedies.  Yet others are creative and write poetry, some are playwrites, others are storytellers.  The creative process of ordering words to create some effect, aesthetic or otherwise, is a fascinating experience of lineal expansion, syllable after syllable, consonant after vowel, mixing, contrasting, conflicting, blending sounds, meanings, denoting, connoting, suggesting, ironizing.  The different combinations of words offer an almost limitless combination of possibilities, themes, meanings, and topics.  Maybe a better question might be, why bother since everything has already been written already?  Is there anything new under the sun?  Was I born too late to write anything of significance?  Perhaps writing something new is all about forgetting and not worrying about who has gone before.  Even Borges postulated that even if Don Quixote were written today, it would be a different book than the one Cervantes wrote.  I hypothesize that writing is a personal experience that has to do with thinking, processing, reformulating, and creating again.  All writing has never been more than the reformulating of all the writing that has already gone before us.  Since it is inevitable that all writers will repeat the words and ideas of their forefathers, then worrying about repeating anything is irrelevant.  Yet my writing, which I write for myself, will be unique to me in my time.  I know that others will read it, but I neither control how they read nor what they will understand, which is actually rather interesting.  Each reader rewrites as they read in totally creative ways which are uncontrollable and unpredictable.  Readers may agree or disagree, but they are thinking.  Writing inspires thinking.  It is a part of a process that weeds through ideas, burns away the irrelevant, and leaves the truth, for all time, for better or worse.  So there it is, writing, a human passion that inspires, heals, and transcends the mundane.