When someone asks (or you ask yourself) why you write, I bet that many of the motivations you think to cite are on this list:

• to understand your experience,
• because you have a story in your heart,
• because you can’t keep yourself from writing,
• because you hope at least one other person on the planet will connect with what you have written and you will feel you’ve accomplished something
• because you enjoy it
• because your enjoy having done it
• because you believe it may be the only thing you can do
• because it takes courage to find out what is true for you and perhaps for others and you want to exercise such courage
• because words mean something to you and you want to use and preserve them
• to grow your authentic self
• to stay alive
• just because you do

And I bet that the ways you come to the page are similar to those on this list:

• with a kernel image that keeps floating into your mind and demands to be explored
• because of an emotional charge you felt from seeing, hearing or touching something and knew it had been given to you to write about
• for a deadline for a literary journal’s reading period or to enter a contest that sparks your interest
• maybe with a prompt you came across that got you wanting to surprise yourself with what you would find to write

Each week, my reading of Writing It Real members’ work takes me through many distressing and joyful experiences, all of them deeply meaningful: aging gracefully, being a caregiver, living all over the world, raising children, living with physical and mental illness, suffering child abuse, living through war times, unraveling the effects of difficult relationships, investigating the dark side of life in order to see the light, loss of dear loved ones, the joy of grand parenting and parenting, love of the natural world, love of being useful in the world through specific professions and community activities.

Whatever cruelties a writer has endured, whatever disappointments and obstructions, writing and sharing the story of those experiences connects the writer to humanity—their own and their readers. Whatever surprises, joys, humorous events and love the writer has experienced also does this. We are all in this lifeboat together moving along to a mysterious destination. Writing is a way of rowing, I think, as well as a way to anchor for a moment and a way sometimes to drift amidst the beauty and strength we can find in shadows or the crystal clarity that can break one’s heart with awe.

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Someone asked me this year how I am feeling “existentially.” I knew what I felt was “connected.” Because of my work with other writers and their writing, I feel a sense of intimacy with others and a sense of passion about life and sense of the importance of continuance, despite dangers, risks, and loss. Joy and beauty always seem to survive and make themselves known even in the darkest of corners, the deepest cracks in our foundations, if we follow our words into the dark to meet the truth of our experience, to name what we can, to applaud the mystery of what we can’t.

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This morning, I opened my email to a link to an amazing video about what it is like to be a refugee. It is from a poem by Jenifer Toksvig, who was inspired by stories and first-hand testimonies from refugees forced to flee their homes and items they took with them.

Actors Keira Knightley, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Capaldi, Stanley Tucci, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kit Harington, Douglas Booth and Jesse Eisenberg, as well as writer Neil Gaiman join the United Nations Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador Cate Blanchett to perform the spoken word poem in support of the #WithRefugees campaign.

It is about Middle Eastern Refugees and it is extremely moving—the situation could be any one of ours at any moment, too, if not from war, than from hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, fires, gas explosions, mud or lava slides. We live in an uncertain world— “There but for the grace of God go I,” we are taught early in life but then forget or suppress so we can go on in our daily lives. Writing makes us remember the tenuousness of life, something that gives our lives their exquisite beauty, something that truly makes us want to help others.

Please watch “What They Took With Them.” Perhaps the listing strategy is reminiscent of Tim O’Brien’s “What They Carried.” War lends itself to writing lists, perhaps as a way of showing us just how mundane and abnormal life in a war is.

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What situation might you write about for which making a list of what you carried with you could evoke the truth of your sadness or of your joy? A hospitalization? A child’s birthday party? A elderly parent’s birthday? Attending a caucus? A funeral? Going to the voting booth or to the mailbox when you mail in your ballot?

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Listing as a strategy for writing is powerful. I hope your life is changed by watching “What They Took With Them,” that you are never again just hearing the news of refugees but also hearing the voices that shared their words, their existential and daily situations.

And I hope that the listing strategy becomes for you a powerful tool for deepening your experience of life’s public and personal events so what you life is never again a forgetting, but instead a deepening.

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Of course, I hope you will be moved to in some way support help for the refugees. Why? Because the poem’s author, Jenifer Toksvig, had the hope that at least one other person on the planet would connect with what she wrote, and she could feel she’d accomplished something.