Why We Do This

"So just how far down d'you wanna go? Or we could talk it out over a cuppa joe, and you could look deep into my eyes like I was a supermodel"-The Refreshments, Banditos

Alright, a brief sidetrack this week away from point of view, because I watched the Banff film festival last night, and in-between thrills it made me remember why it is that I write, and more specifically why I write what I write.

Quite simply, it boils down to this: Art moves people.

Last night I saw it in the form of documentary film--I saw people doing incredible things, like backflipping off of cables into thousand foot vertical caves and climbing hundreds of meters off the ground without ropes. I also got to hear them explaining why it is they do what they do, and it moved me.

The feeling you get when you experience someone else doing something incredible, the shiver that runs down your spine, the way you can empathize with them, is an inextricable and extremely important part of what makes us human. And whether you get that feeling from reading about an elf's desperate last stand or a drug addict's against-the-odds recovery doesn't matter to me.

What matters is that you feel it, and that's why I write.