Hi, this is Chris Hobbs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about writing.

When I tell you I’m an engineer, it may not immediately correlate or come to you that I’m also very interested in writing.

But I am.

I’ve enjoyed writing since I was a kid.

You know, when I took the standardized tests in high school, I scored better on the writing part than the math part, which may be kind of funny for a science-minded guy, but there you go.

I suppose I can attribute some of that to just the enormous amount of reading that I did as a kid, pretty much from the time I could read until the present, but also just a good amount of writing, parsing language, writing letters to people, different things that have me putting pen to paper and later on then putting words into a computer file to express thoughts and to think about what I meant.

And where I’ve really gotten to is recognizing how much I use the act of writing to help clarify my thoughts.

As I’m thinking through an issue, if I can put it into words, if I can get those words down on a page, and then they make sense to me when they get done, then I get to the point where it’s like, okay, maybe this is a thought that holds up, that’s worth retaining, that’s worth chasing further, that’s worth adopting for a while.

Whereas sometimes the other thing happens, and you write, and I write, and I find out, oh, wait.

That doesn’t add up, or there’s a hole in that reasoning, or those thoughts don’t actually connect the way I thought they did.

And it’s a good point then to stop myself and to go back and rethink.

Usually, if you look at my blogging history over a couple decades of blogging, I end up writing in spurts where I’m, you know, in the middle of working through some issue, and I will end up writing and publishing a bunch of posts in fairly short order.

And then there may be a period of time, longer periods of time, where I don’t write anything, and it’s, you know, probably bad for my engagement numbers if I care about a thing like that.

But it just reflects where my mental processes are at at the moment.

Say all this to then run across—so I ran across a quote reading a book yesterday, which I chased down for bigger context, and I just loved it in this vein.

So this is from a letter that Saint Augustine wrote something like 1,600 years ago.

And in the second bit of this letter, somebody thinks he might have made a mistake in something he wrote, and they want to ask him a question about it.

And I stumbled upon this line, which was the line that got quoted, and I went, Whoa, because here’s what Augustine said.

He says, I freely confess, accordingly, that I endeavor to be one of those who write because they’ve made some progress, and who, by means of writing, make further progress.

And I went, Well, that’s it.

That’s exactly it.

That’s what I’m trying to do too.

I’m not going to claim to be Saint Augustine at his level of thought or writing or anything else, but that mindset—I write because I made some progress in my thought, and I write because I hope it helps me make more progress.

Bingo.

Exactly.

And then I love how he continues it, and I chuckled as I went on.

He says, If, therefore, through inadvertence or want of knowledge, anything has been stated by me which may, with good reason, be condemned not only by others who are able to discover it, but also by myself, he says, for I’m making progress, I ought at least, after it’s been pointed out, to see it.

He says, Such a mistake is not to be regarded with surprise or grief, but rather forgiven, and made the occasion of congratulating me, not, of course, on having erred, but on having renounced an error.

I just, I have to chuckle at this.

He’s like, If you discover I made a mistake, congratulate me once I see it, because it means that I’m learning and I’m continuing to make progress.

So I both hope with my writing that I can work out my thoughts and make progress in that way and continue to learn and grow in my thinking, and also similarly hope that I have the humility that Augustine aspires to, as he writes here, to embrace and welcome correction when people read that and can provide me further insight and help me work out things further.

Who knew you could get so much goodness out of putting words to a page?

We’ll talk later.