If you go back to my first Instagram posts, you’ll see that I have almost no eye for photography. Actually, you don’t really have to go back to see that. My latest pics are proof enough. But in the early days, I didn’t even know I wasn’t a good photographer, and I wasn’t necessarily trying to be. I was just posting pictures.

But then other people got more likes and VSCO Cam came along and other people got even more likes, and I started trying to keep up. Which was no small feat because the ante kept getting bigger. Technology got more sophisticated, sure, but everyone else also got more savvy. We spend time composing our pictures, we note and imitate styles we like, we tweak the smallest details to get the desired effect — all those things that make creative endeavors wonderful and rewarding.

We learned to do more than take pictures; we learned to be photographers (ok, so not me in particular, but society as a whole).

And I was thinking today, that if we spent the same amount of time on our writing — if we researched techniques that had worked and had not, applied the same scrutiny to our words, composed with the same degree of care — why, we’d all be poets. We’d bring beauty to our conversations, elegance to our spheres of discourse, and magnificence to the mundane.

I mean, if there were an app for it.