Every morning,
I set my alarm 15 minutes before the time I actually have to get up.
I sit up in bed, take my notebook and pencil,
which I always leave on my bedside table the night before,
and start writing.
In that zone of being half awake and half asleep,
I write for 15 minutes.
I write before I get up,
before I've had a chance to talk to anyone,
before I've had a chance to wash my face.
Most of the time, I don't even know what I'm writing about,
and it doesn't really matter.
What does matter is not the content of what I write,
but the very fact of putting pen to paper.
I'm involved in two disciplines that have fancy names:
ethnomusicology and life writing.
As an ethnomusicologist, I study people playing music.
I meet musicians, I interview them,
I learn about their music,
and then I write about them.
As a life-writer, I write about people's lives.
Sometimes they're musicians, sometimes they're not.
Sometimes I write about other people's lives,
sometimes I write about my own.
The thing that binds my two seemingly non-agreeing disciplines together
is writing.
Before turning to writing,
I studied music in Thessaloniki, Vienna and London.
As part of my PhD in ethnomusicology,
I had to come to Cyprus for a year of fieldwork.
I spent a year here interviewing musicians,
talking to them about their lives,
playing and singing with them,
and learning how they thought about the music that they played and sang.
After that year was over,
I went back to London to write up the results of my research.
There were all these stories that I wanted to share,
all these experiences that I wanted to write about,
but I didn't know how.
The problem was not that I couldn't write;
the problem was that I didn't really know what my own voice sounded like.
That's when I first came across the idea that I'd like to share with you today.
The idea of writing that teaches you to hear and trust your own voice.
So, reflecting on the theme of this conference,
what I'd like to talk about today
is whether writing can make us look deeper.
Can writing make us reach feelings, thoughts and desires
that perhaps we didn't even know we had?
Can it connect us with what it is that we've always wanted to do in life
but were somehow too scared to admit?
When I ask people this question,
the answer I very often get is "I find writing scary."
But what is it about writing that people find scary?
On the face of it, writing is just a simple act.
You take a piece of paper,
you take a pen or a pencil or you switch your computer on,
and you write.
Yet most of us here today have experienced the fear of the blank page,
the fear of not knowing what to write.
So, what exactly is so scary?
It's not the simple act of writing that's scary, of course,
but what lies behind it:
expectation and hearing -
and I mean really hearing -
your own voice.
Expectation is a great vice.
When I ask people whether they think that writing could change their lives,
another version of the answer I get is "I don't write."
So, when I ask back: "Okay, so what do you mean, you don't write?"
The answer I get then is "I'm not a writer."
But remember, the question here
wasn't whether you could write the next great European novel,
nor whether you could win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The question here was whether the simple -
though, I admit, not easy -
act of writing can make us look deeper.
So, there's a feeling of expectation lurking about
when we talk about writing,
in ways that it doesn't exist when we talk about other things.
If I ask you, for example, "Do you cook?"
you won't necessarily think that what I'm implying
is whether you've won a Michelin star for your cooking.
By contrast though, in my question about writing,
what people seem to assume is that I want to know
whether they've won the equivalent of a Michelin star for their writing.
Most of us think of writing as something formal,
something done only when we apply a certain number of rules and regulations,
and something that should bring about very concrete results:
a book, a poem, a piece of research.
But here we're talking about writing
that will connect you with nothing other than yourself,
something that you do in order to come closer to who you really are.
When you write with any degree of regularity -
and again, I don't mean when you write in order to become a novelist
but simply when you write -
something wondrous begins to happen.
After training yourself to write without thinking
for one, two or three weeks,
then you suddenly begin to hear your own voice
much more clearly than before.
Our mind is normally cluttered by a variety of thoughts and voices
which we don't actually hear,
and which, luckily, we don't actually lead.
But they're always there in the background.
If any of you have ever tried yoga or meditation before,
and you're asked to keep your mind still for as little as two minutes,
you know how difficult this really is.
According to data provided by [an] institute of neuroresearch in the U.S.,
an average person has approximately 70,000 thoughts per day.
Other research shows this number to be a bit smaller or a bit bigger,
but this is, more or less, the average.
The Buddhists call this incessant movement of thoughts in our head "monkey mind."
Just as a monkey constantly jumps from one branch
or from one tree to the other,
so does a monkey mind constantly jump from one thought to the other,
seemingly without ever being able to stop.
Alright, so this is not exactly a scientific metaphor,
but our mind resembles a big, noisy highway
with hundreds of cars passing through it every day.
What the practice of writing does
is that it slowly gets rid of all the extra noise in our head,
making it resemble a rural street instead.
And that's when it gets really scary for many people.
Why?
Because in all of that peacefulness,
when you're finally able to hear your own voice,
you might suddenly discover
that you don't actually like the job that you do,
or that you don't really want to live in that huge house that you just bought,
or that you'd rather get a parrot rather than the dog that you already have.
The feeling of being scared
comes from our being too close to ourselves.
In fact, this closeness to ourselves,
this opening up to see things that we didn't even know were there,
is why there's a therapeutic side to writing as well,
to the extent that it now forms part of psychology.
There's a form of therapy called "writing therapy."
This is not of concern to us here today,
but it goes to show that writing
does something to our way of looking at ourselves and other people
that's truly transformative.
Something more familiar to us, perhaps, than writing therapy
might be the figure of a person who keeps a journal or a diary
where his or her innermost thoughts and feelings are recorded.
These diaries are, more often than not, not meant to be seen,
but they serve the purpose
of connecting their author to their feelings, thoughts and desires.
Okay, so how could we use writing in our own lives
in order to look deeper and come closer to ourselves?
How could any one of us here in this audience today
use writing in order to listen to our own voice?
You might think that this doesn't really concern you,
that your life or job has absolutely nothing to do with writing.
Yet even if what you have to do
is write a professional email or compose a legal document,
you'll be surprised at how much more convincing and official you'll sound
if you know what your own voice actually sounds like.
The practice is very simple and very cheap too.
And many people have already written about this.
All you need is a notebook and a pen or a pencil.
You may wonder whether you could do all this on a computer.
Well, you could, but it won't be the same experience.
Recent studies have shown
that children's brains develop differently when writing by hand,
as opposed to writing on the keyboard.
And there's evidence to suggest
that there are comparable benefits in adults writing by hand too.
What's more, writing is not only an intellectual activity.
If you write by hand, your whole body gets involved in the process.
Your hand becomes an extension of your mind,
and so the whole process of writing becomes a mind and body activity.
Okay, so back to the practice.
You go and sit somewhere quiet,
somewhere you're less likely to have any interruptions,
and you start writing without thinking.
Now, this is the difficult part.
You do not think about writing,
you do not think about anything.
So while you're writing,
you're not thinking "Hmm, I wonder what I'm going to cook tomorrow for lunch."
Nor are you thinking "Well, I wish I'd put the black coat instead of the red one."
No, you write without thinking; you keep your hand moving.
That is the key.
You do not stop to check,
you do not stop to correct.
You do not care about your spelling,
you do not care about the lines on the paper.
You write in whatever language, dialect or idiom that you like,
or in a combination of languages or idioms.
You keep your hand moving.
You write without thinking for 15 minutes.
That is the key.
When you are done, you do not go back to check what you've written.
You simply close your notebook until your next writing session.
So, what do you write about?
Anything.
You try to catch your thoughts and put them on paper as quickly as you can.
After all the clutter in your mind is gone,
you might suddenly discover
that there were things that you wanted to write after all:
those stories your grandfather used to tell you,
those letters that your parents gave you,
or love or loss or the feeling of trauma or happiness in your life.
If you write with any degree of regularity,
the question of discipline becomes crucial.
Remember that you're not writing for an audience here, but for yourself.
Yet the repetition is vital
for cutting out any resistance that you may have to writing.
Tolstoy once wrote in his diary:
"I must write each day without fail,
not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine."
I understand that perhaps not all of us may be able to keep up with such a demand,
but even if we don't write each day without fail,
the important thing is to keep the practice of writing,
despite all the difficulties that may and that will arise in the process.
I can almost hear some of you saying "This is hard."
Yes, of course it is.
No one ever said this was going to be easy.
But it's also all about practice.
If you decide to run the marathon,
you won't simply show up on the day of the race.
You'll start training yourself, little by little,
until finally you're able to run the whole thing.
It's exactly the same with writing.
We don't expect to run the marathon on the first day.
But we practice each day,
each day taking it a little bit further.
For those of you who may wonder what the point of all this is,
or why you should devote any of your precious little time to writing,
I can tell you it's because this will transform your lives.
So, if you would really like to look deeper,
both within yourselves and within other people,
if you would really like to get to know what your own voice sounds like,
if you would really like to get to know
what it is that you truly want to do in life,
then give writing a chance.
Write with no expectations and no demands.
Write simply with the curiosity to see what will happen
and with the conviction that something will happen.
Look deeper and keep writing.
Thank you.
(Applause)