Topic: Preserve or Destroy
I just read a news story about Tibetan monks who spent a week creating a sand panting only to destroy it. The destruction symbolizes impermanence of material things, even those things of beauty. They simply sweep up all their hard work. The sand is given away or added back to nature. This last sand painting was absolutely gorgeous!
Words are probably the easiest to destroy. We can simply push a button to delete a word or an entire document. Thankfully, not all of us feel as the Tibetan monk’s do. Preservation seems to be the order of the day. When we write, there is usually a reason behind it. Even if the reason loses its meaning over time, the writing meant something to us. We preserve that piece of time.
We can often look back at our work and know what was going on at the time it was written. Our works, to us, are something of a diary of our days. Since some writing is said to be cathartic, even darker writes are preserved. Those darker days are still a part of us and the writing documents that fact.
To destroy our words is to destroy part of us. Just like a snapshot that captures a specific moment, our words capture a specific mood or time period. Of course, the author may be the only person to know the true significance of the words, but significant they are. Let’s say, for example, that we’ve written a very upbeat piece. We may know that this upbeat piece is uncharacteristic since we suffer from depression. Our readers might not know this.
Material things quite probably shouldn’t have as much meaning as they do, but art comes from deep within each person. I can’t see the justification of destroying it.