Have you ever tried to write a haiku? If ya don’t know it’s a type of Japanese poem, and since most of us don’t know Japanese, there’s an Anglicized version that goes like this:

First line five syllables

Second line seven syllables

Third line five syllables

Got it? I know, I suck at it. I couldn’t even make those instructions into a haiku (it woulda been cool though, huh?). Now you may be wondering why I even bring this up. Well I was thinking about things that seem easy but are really very difficult. Like dancing. And playing drums. And of course then I thought “haiku”!

At first it seems easier to write a short poem than a long one, but once you try it you realize how hard it is to condense all your thoughts on a subject into 17 little syllables. Let’s pick a random subject: basket weaving. It would be easy to write a thoroughly footnoted and researched essay to help one understand basket weaving, but its almost impossible to capture the essence of it in a haiku. The best I could come up with is this:

tiny strips of wood

molded into works of art

which carry my stuff

I know! Sucks, huh? That’s why I wrote this long blog to communicate this idea instead of a haiku about haiku. But I’d like to teach myself the discipline to streamline my ideas into easily digestible nuggets. Just in case I ever need to, say, teach parachuting to someone in the 7 seconds before a plane crashes. I can’t be like, “Okay, see, first, you pull out the thingy, then you attach this SPLAT!!!!”

It’s cool to pick a subject and try to write a haiku about it.

Hey that was 17 syllables right there and it communicated my idea better than everything I wrote before it. Maybe I can get the hang of this.