Author: admin

Charting our own course

Troubling as it might be, is it that we, in the West, must simply decide for ourselves? Look out at the world and, based on our understanding and sense of how much each thing matters, choose what we’ll buy into, do, say, think or believe. As if, somehow, this whole “project” was untangling all that might compel or coerce us, leaving us free to make up our own minds about what life will be.

It’s a beautiful notion, in many ways: that people might be worthy of such trust in their ability to grasp complex realities in thought then chart courses that’ll lead only in good directions (Notes One). It’s placing great faith in the institutions that guide us: those charged with preparing people for this quite staggering level of responsibility with all the consequences it entails.

Sometimes, though, it just seems a clamour of everyone talking at once, trying to win you over to their way of thinking. As if, in the middle of all this freedom, thousands on soapboxes are beckoning, threatening or berating us to accept their conclusions and follow whatever paths they’re proposing.

Between commercial, cultural or state actors and whoever else might have an opinion, how are we to filter through all we’re hearing? All those feeling it’s worth appealing to our psychological weaknesses or interests for the sake of whatever choice they might induce us to make. As if our freedom is simply this free-for-all with the future – profit or power – up for grabs. (Notes Two)

Whose understanding of “life” is so thorough they can confidently ignore all that needs to be ignored? Otherwise, aren’t we destined to listen to all this? Pay attention to this whole increasingly bizarre conversation in the hope of understanding what’s going on and where we should stand in response to it all. What kind of mental, emotional, physical or social burden is that?

The idea of maintaining a clear yet flexible grasp on reality – what life is, all that’s essential, the complex nature of human beings and their environments – sometimes seems unfathomably challenging. As if we’re each standing in front of it all, encased within our own personal concerns, trying to find our way and emerge with our values, soul and ideals somehow intact. (Notes Three)

How are we to navigate through all that’s thrown at us? All the stupidity, fear, anger or sadness. The convoluted, pressured explanations of modern situations. The social or intellectual weaponry that’s so often wielded within the deeply important battles for the future of this idealistic way of life. (Notes Four)

Don’t we, somehow, need to find the boundary to healthy ways of thinking? The place at the edge of ourselves where we can compassionately respond with good ideas for how to act. Thought might well incapacitate us if we’re not reaching the point where decisions arise from our reflections.

How are we to hold to all our values represent – act well, relate wisely to others – in the midst of this strange battle?

Notes and References:

Note 1: Thought, knowledge & coherent vision
Note 1: Being trusted to use our discernment…
Note 1: Responsibility for the bigger picture
Note 1: Gaining clarity on the choices before us
Note 2: Do markets create strange social forces?
Note 2: Appealing to human nature or the human spirit
Note 2: The battlegrounds of our minds
Note 3: Do we live in different worlds?
Note 3: All that we carry around with us
Note 3: Tuning out the static
Note 3: Bringing things into awareness
Note 4: World, heading for a breakdown?
Note 4: Words & relating as paths to change
Note 4: Nothing short of everything

Ways to share this:

Nothing short of everything

When it comes to change – to any way of life, really, given how they effectively amount to a slow process of change – how are we to find our way between all the options we’re presented with? Sometimes it’s as if we’re simply surrounded by choices: all the things people saw fit to lay before us as potential paths we might take. Every decision we make forever altering this world we’re living in.

Doesn’t it all come together? All the habitual or deliberate choices, subconscious ingrained patterns and their strangely contorted modern forms flowing into this marketplace of suggestions accepted, locked in and lived. All of our words and attitudes flitting out there as examples of how to be or condonements for how things are. All these ways we’re going along with what’s enveloping us each day. (Notes One)

Almost as if it’s all one big picture of what we’re thinking, what matters to us, and how well we’re understanding what we’re engaged in. Ideas spreading between us in the social or virtual worlds we’ve embedded ourselves in, reinforcing things to the point where we’re conceivably all living in quite different versions of the same reality. All caught up in our own interpretations of what’s going on. (Notes Two)

Yet, as with fitness, isn’t it all connected? All part of one body where weakness or imbalance affects the whole so only a holistic approach can fully restore health. If it’s all one system, what happens if we pull in different directions with different ideas in mind? If we’re not understanding what we’re doing or why it matters, how can we hope to move together toward common goals?

Given, in the West, those systems are based on the fundamental notion of personal freedom, how are we ever to operate with one mind, one set of intentions or priorities as to what’s most important? Especially when we’re being ushered down whatever paths our interests or wounds led us towards – every possible temptation or addiction having been placed before us as an option. (Notes Three)

Sometimes it all seems like an incredibly fractured whole; imperfect ideas engulfing us to create wounded people and damaging situations as things freely work themselves out across the generations. Everything feeding into this one complex problem without any clear, straightforward solution. As if freedom without values or discipline is a dangerous prospect: which paths will be chosen?

If the lives we’re living – the realities we’re creating – are to be built on notions of freedom, don’t we “need” to understand it all? As if what’s needed is nothing short of everything, everyone, and a constant growth in both knowledge and compassion. Otherwise, won’t we forever be creating problems? Any ignorance or lack of awareness rippling out to become another thing we’ll have to resolve. (Notes Four)

Without looking to the whole body – be it national or international, given how few lives or lifestyles are actually contained within any one set of borders – how can things ever work well between us?

Notes and References:

Note 1: All we’re expected to understand
Note 1: All we concern ourselves with & encourage
Note 1: Gaining clarity on the choices before us
Note 1: How are we supposed to choose?
Note 2: Do we live in different worlds?
Note 2: Responsibility for the bigger picture
Note 2: Everything’s interconnected
Note 2: Connecting truthfully with life
Note 3: Are we wise, living this way?
Note 3: Solving all the problems we’re creating
Note 3: Markets, and what they might mean
Note 3: Tuning out the static
Note 4: Times of revelation
Note 4: The incredible responsibility of freedom
Note 4: Being trusted to use our discernment…
Note 4: How fast can it all unravel?

Thinking more about the process, there’s also How quickly things can change.

Ways to share this:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

Of all that’s surrounding us in life, how much is false yet beautiful? The pretence of beauty when, underneath, there’s little substance to truly justify the illusion. As if it’s now too easy to create the veneer, the superficial representation of something, without that which might’ve made it shine from within quite naturally. While truth itself might come across as less appealing, less pleasurable to look at.

The modern code as to what’s beautiful sometimes seems strangely distorted: given how easy it is to craft an image, what are we to read into whatever choices people might make? If beauty – in appearances, style or branding – can essentially be bought, aren’t we admiring money and inclination more than anything else? To think it says anything about the nature of what lies within could be quite mistaken. (Notes One)

In terms of culture, however, it seems we’re encouraged to feel that beauty represents goodness, ugliness the reverse. As if attractive people are somehow better – the ones we should be listening to, following, giving power within our community – while the less attractive are destined to stand on the sidelines or take on the part of evil. What does it mean to draw such simplistic lines between inner and outer?

While we might have more tools readily at our disposal than humanity ever has, what does it mean if we’re using them to craft illusions? To conceal and misrepresent ourselves with the constructed vision of how we’d like to appear. As if we’re increasingly wearing all these complex masks while the true self might never be seen – locked away, while some other version lives.

Isn’t there truth to honesty? To letting things be seen as they are. All the wear of time, form and function etching itself onto the surfaces of our lives. Everything speaking of its role in life, its purpose and usage. It all coming together into a clearly readable sense of where we stand, what we’re dealing with and what it all means. (Notes Two)

What are we actually doing in concealing truth? As if the whole of life might be an illusion – all this marketing spin coming to life and replacing what’s truly going on beneath. All the underlying realities still “there”, festering away unnoticed or unresolved, while something quite different takes place on the surface. What’s the point in hiding the truth and pretending something else is happening?

Sometimes it seems truth – despite its potential ugliness – might be more valuable, more worthwhile. At least then mistaken attitudes, choices or ideas can be exposed. Bringing things to the light of day, don’t we see what life truly is and how well we’re valuing all that goes into creating this complex and beautiful whole? Valuing everything rightly – even the darkness that needs releasing – seems important. (Notes Three)

If all of life’s a blend of light and dark, right and wrong, truth and lies, the paths we take within it may not be easy or attractive but they must make a difference.

Notes and References:

Note 1: What do we see in beauty?
Note 1: Valuable insights actors can offer
Note 1: Observing life & stepping outside of reality
Note 1: Definition, expression & interpretation
Note 1: Do we know what stands before us?
Note 2: Values and the economic
Note 2: Aesthetic value of nature
Note 2: Masks we all wear
Note 2: Diplomacy and knowing where we stand
Note 2: Knowing who to trust
Note 3: Art as a way to subvert or inspire
Note 3: What makes a good life
Note 3: Visual language and spaces
Note 3: Times of revelation
Note 3: Living as a form of art

Ways to share this:

Gaining clarity on the choices before us

With all that’s going on in life, how are we to truly see what matters or what our choices actually are? Seeing life as a sequence of decisions we make, paths we walk, consequences we set in motion, how clear is it what every step represents and how well they’re relating to all the others we might’ve taken? As if life is a tangle of separate but interrelated choices all leaning up on one another.

Life just seems to have rapidly gotten very complicated as new threads are added, new balls to juggle or plates to spin, until it’s not seeming entirely clear what we were doing in the first place and how “this” relates to what went before. As if our lives now are strangely distorted echoes of what life had always been – old practices taking on new forms and merging into something quite different.

And it almost seems inevitable: this is how life is. We either jump on board, embrace it all, or get left behind as we question the methods suggested or direction things seem to be headed. As if there’s no conversation to be had, no choice in the matter, no alternative to this broad sweeping path we’re often forced into. (Notes One)

Yet, if our lives and all the choices they entail effectively “become” the realities set in motion around us – affecting countless others across the globe, dismantling infrastructure, altering environments – isn’t it important we step back to see what it is that we’re doing? It might be a wave, a tide, with its own agenda and momentum, but is it right to be simply swept along for the ride?

In a strange way, this year seems to have really shone a light on all our lives are: the interconnectedness, the freedom, the complexity of our activities and precariousness of some aspects, the grasp we have of it all. As if our lives were all woven into this global reality few really understand – a convoluted series of transactions loosely based on our adherence to certain traditions or patterns of behaviour. (Notes Two)

As if the underlying structures – all the distinct choices, the meaning behind them and substance within them – were brought to our attention and called into question. Which things are truly essential? Things to preserve and defend at any cost as principles vital to the very essence of human existence. Which of the many things we’ve become used to could quite honestly be snipped away without any true loss?

This sense in which we’ve been asked to re-evaluate our lives and, often, constrain ourselves for the protection of people we never see. A strange test of our commitment to the invisible notion of community: how well do we understand all our lives comprise of, all the lives connected with and affected by all we do? Are we capable of limiting our own freedom for the sake of such values? (Notes Three)

Crisis or not, are we aware of all we’re actively engaged in creating?

Notes and References:

Note 1: Bringing things into awareness
Note 1: Situations which ask us to trust
Note 1: Pace of change & getting nowhere fast
Note 1: Systems, their power, whose hands?
Note 2: Integrity and integration
Note 2: All we concern ourselves with & encourage
Note 2: All we’re expected to understand
Note 2: Responsibility for the bigger picture
Note 3: Mutual awareness and accommodation?
Note 3: Appealing to human nature or the human spirit
Note 3: Lacking the human side of community?
Note 3: The incredible responsibility of freedom

Ways to share this:

What are we building here?

Looking at all the stories, perspectives and interpretations we’re taking in each day, how much is what might broadly be described as culture actually helping us fully understand reality and respond constructively within it? Is this a process that’s guiding us toward creating a better future or one that might be sweeping us along with its version of things into situations we might rather avoid? (Notes One)

If this whole conversation running alongside reality is to somehow serve in making things better – grasping the true nature of problems; seeing how to resolve or eradicate them – isn’t it important we understand what’s needed from us in response to it all? Are we to passively consume all that’s laid out there, letting it fill our souls with any ideas it sees fit, or might we be better off holding things at arm’s length?

How much are we viewing as examples for how we should act, rather than an exploration on more symbolic levels? Questionable patterns of behaviour perhaps trickling into society through the quiet emulation of modelled ways of being. Might it not be that instead of soothing, healing or guiding us culture sometimes acts to exacerbate our struggles? Lodging strange ideas in our psyche that play out through all our lives.

In many ways, this side of life seems to have drifted from something tightly controlled and regulated to being completely governed by our own interests. But, given the choice, do we know to choose between poison and medicine? Might we not burrow away into our concerns, effectively make identities out of them? Things that could’ve been processed and released becoming, instead, a way of life. (Notes Two)

Sometimes it seems we might even retreat from society into these other worlds: seeing ourselves, relating to others, understanding reality mainly in the light of whatever narratives connected the most. What would it mean to set up camp in some imaginative alternative to life, interpreting everything through that lens and responding as if it were real? The ideas of culture making their ways out into reality.

Instead of this conversation with all its stories serving to nourish and sustain society with meaningful reflections of itself, might we not get caught in prisons of our own making? Our own existence – our wounds, affinities and choices – all amplified to the point where we’re so far from one another, so extreme in the identity we’ve created, that the relationships of reality become hard to bear. (Notes Three)

We may be surrounded by all the options money and technology deem profitable, but if this process deals as much with society’s values as it does the makeup of our inner lives and relationships, are we wise to hand things over to those forces? The choices for how we live perhaps being dictated by concerns quite other than the question of whether they’re healthy.

If the ideas we have in mind become the frame through which we see and respond to life, what’s likely to come of all this?

Notes and References:

Note 1: Do we know what we’re doing?
Note 1: What’s the idea with culture?
Note 1: Learning from the past, looking to the future
Note 1: Literature that’s treating the soul
Note 2: It resonates, but should it be amplified
Note 2: Living your life through a song
Note 2: Emotion and culture’s realities
Note 2: Conversation as revelation
Note 3: All that we carry around with us
Note 3: The battlegrounds of our minds
Note 3: Might we lose our social muscles?
Note 3: Going along with what we see

Ways to share this:

Thought, knowledge & coherent vision

Thinking of how, as humans, we tend to approach the world through thought, deciding what we’ll do on that basis, it can’t be said the ideas we have in mind don’t actively shape the reality around us. Isn’t everything we’re thinking almost always seeping out there, tacitly or implicitly, as our sense of what it all means and how much of it matters? All our actions speaking volumes about our ideas, beliefs and values.

As much as we might effectively “see” the world through thought, it must be that almost all that we do stems from it too – all the unchallenged patterns of behaviour we might’ve accepted from the past; examples we take up from those around us; or independent decisions we may make in the face of such external influences. As if we’re forever accepting or rejecting whatever suggestions are offered. (Notes One)

Isn’t it that, as individuals or societies, we’re essentially mapping the world around us in thought? Filling our minds with ideas as to what each thing signifies, where it sits in the bigger picture and how to be thinking about it. This world of ideas sitting slightly behind reality, telling us what it all means and how we should act in relation to it. A place full of knowledge, understanding and value judgements.

Almost as if reality is surrounded by our thoughts about it – the sense humans have made of it all and ideas we’ve strung together to explain things and help people chart wise courses through their decisions. How we each, in our heads, have pictures of what life “is” from which we’re confidently living our lives and assessing whatever’s crossing our path. (Notes Two)

Where do such ideas come from? In the past, there may’ve been single bodies of thought which almost everyone agreed to abide by – offering a fairly coherent sense of how to live and interpret life – but that seems to have rapidly fallen away. In its place, aren’t we generally making up our own minds? Deciding for ourselves how we’ll define things, judge them and string those thoughts into our own personal conclusions.

How are we to navigate such a world? Can we ever hope to find a coherent worldview we all agree upon? One where each thing holds the same meaning in all eyes, related to everything else in exactly the same manner. A single body of thought that might explain what everything means, why it matters and how we should relate ourselves to it. Isn’t it what we seem to seek? The right answer.

Yet, in this modern world, our separately developed ideas on life now merge into one new global reality – a place without the convenience of simply retelling stories from our own perspective and justifying them in terms of our own thinking. Almost as if we’re being asked to expand our perspective to include countless others, seeing and feeling life through their eyes too. (Notes Three)

Can it all still be integrated into a meaningful, purposeful whole?

Notes and References:

Note 1: Where do we get our ideas from?
Note 1: Can our thinking match realities?
Note 1: The battlegrounds of our minds
Note 1: Education as a breaking away?
Note 1: Everything’s interconnected
Note 2: Do we live in different worlds?
Note 2: The sense of having a worldview
Note 2: Being trusted to use our discernment…
Note 2: Education as an understanding of life
Note 2: Responsibility for the bigger picture
Note 3: Bringing things into awareness
Note 3: Seeing where others are coming from
Note 3: Sensitivity & the place for feeling
Note 3: World, heading for a breakdown?
Note 3: How fast can it all unravel?

Ways to share this:

Bringing things into awareness

Trying to figure out where we stand as modern humanity has always been a large part of what this writing project’s about – digging down into the ideas behind how we live and where they seem likely to lead. Because, in a way, isn’t that what modern life asks of us? Everything laid bare, voiced from every angle, as part of this new conversation trying to get to the bottom of all that’s going on.

One of the many insightful challenges we’re facing must be how there’s nowhere to hide? Our lives being run through technology, every inclination finding some seemingly secret avenue for expression and exploration, sometimes seems like a strangely convoluted way of getting everything out in the open. Isn’t it all there? All the interests and consequences discernible, if we care to look. (Notes One)

Almost as if everything we’ve seen as acceptable has been captured by this new way of operating – a strange snapshot of where humanity had got to by all those moments in time. Situations that’ve since been dialled up in all these self-referential ways to become the complex systems our lives are now so closely woven into. As if society were engulfed by the limitations in its own way of thinking. (Notes Two)

Aren’t we surrounded by the outworkings of potentially quite mistaken ideas? Things that once made sense or sat harmoniously within their natural and social environment now becoming unwieldly as they’re conducted on the global scale. Things like diet; waste; greed; intolerance. All the things societies have “always” struggled with having been transposed into this new interweaving community.

Within it all, what are we to make of modern life’s insistent level of awareness? Of all that’s being brought to our attention, quite legitimately seeking our understanding and engagement, as “all that’s wrong in the world” is constantly exposed for the suffering it’s causing. Our roles in facilitating, tolerating or benefitting from situations being diligently pointed out in the hope we’ll realise what we’re taking part in (Notes Three).

Isn’t it that we’re always a link in the chain? Each person standing “under” the ramifications of the past and “under” the future we’re involved in creating by way of our every decision. As if each moment is an opportunity to either resolve problems or perpetuate them – our awareness, perhaps, being the resistance that prevents us from understanding how much our earlier ideas might’ve been mistaken. (Notes Four)

How’s that conversation to go? If patterns we inherited were reasonable on the scale they once happened, how are we to navigate them being dialled up to unmanageable levels – any imperfection now magnified onto the global scale? Almost as if every way of life is being asked to change, as it cannot be expanded to accommodate everyone. As if we’re all needing to negotiate new ways of being.

Finding deep understanding of our own way of life – all it means, why it matters, what’s truly essential – while allowing others the same freedom sometimes seems incredibly complicated.

Notes and References:

Note 1: The picture data paints of us
Note 1: Times of revelation
Note 1: Responsibility for the bigger picture
Note 2: Systems, their power, whose hands?
Note 2: Where’s the reset button & can we press it?
Note 3: Understanding what we’re all part of
Note 3: Does technology oversimplify things?
Note 3: Education as an understanding of life
Note 3: Can our thinking match realities?
Note 3: All we’re expected to understand
Note 4: Will things change if we don’t make them?
Note 4: Detaching ourselves from the past
Note 4: How fast can it all unravel?
Note 4: Desire to retreat, need to engage

Ways to share this:

Rich complexity of human being

Can we ever say there’s only one way to be human? One set of thoughts to think and conclusions to reach about “life”, what it means and how we should live it. Or, are we each our own version of all life can be? The distinct configuration of our own personal experiences “being” what’s made us who we are, shaped our understanding and led us to interact with life as we currently do.

As if each human is poured into their time, their place, their family and, living through it with their own unique nature, becomes the person they then are with all the interests, wounds or concerns that most preoccupy their mind. All these individually-experienced perspectives on life that emerge from whoever’s standing at every given point within all the complex systems and realities now making up our lives. (Notes One)

It seems no two people are ever going to see everything exactly the same way; each having a slightly yet significantly different set of experiences, ideas or values nestled behind whatever broad similarity may appear on the surface. That, digging even a little underneath anyone’s views, you’d find a world of difference in how we’re seeing things, what we think matters and why we’re holding to them.

How do any ideas make their way into our minds? Stacking themselves up over the years into the solid or precarious constructions that make up our worldview or blueprint for how we’ll be living life. How many of the conclusions we’re building our lives upon might’ve been mistaken, misguided or the product of imperfect sources, situations or reasoning? Strange building blocks we might be wise to reconsider. (Notes Two)

Life starts to seem like a strange dance of humans taking up their parts and playing them out as they will. All the interactions between us and choices we’re making “becoming” the realities we all have to live with: the ideas we have of one another and awareness we may or may not have about how exactly “we” touch upon others and convey to them our sense of what their life’s worth. (Notes Three)

How can we ever really know what another’s life is like? All that’s made them who they are. The face the world’s turned towards them through the opportunities, prejudgements or assumptions they’re met with. Almost as if we’re living among countless strangers, despite having a great many things in common, with very little time to develop genuine interest in or understanding of one another. (Notes Four)

In all the complexity of modern life, isn’t there an equal complexity to each human existence? The lived humanity of each point in the picture as people hope to be met with love, respect and the freedom to be who they are, heal all their wounds and forge a future. Living these increasingly distracting and pressured lives, might we lose sight of those around us and what’s being asked of them?

What, within it all, is our idea of the human life?

Notes and References:

Note 1: Do we live in different worlds?
Note 1: Humans, tangled in these systems
Note 1: Integrity and integration
Note 1: Valuing people more
Note 2: The thought surrounding us
Note 2: Where do we get our ideas from?
Note 2: Shaping the buildings that shape us
Note 3: Value and meaning in our lives
Note 3: Mutual awareness and accommodation?
Note 3: The battlegrounds of our minds
Note 3: Giving others space to be
Note 4: All that we carry around with us
Note 4: These ideas we have of one another
Note 4: Treading carefully in the lives of others

How we might work around such struggles was one of the questions of Can there be beauty in communication?

Ways to share this:

Are we wise, living this way?

Of all the ways we could conceivably be living in this world, how is it we’re choosing to spend our time? Out of all the options, suggestions, established or hypothetical patterns of behaviour, and thoughts we can choose between, what methods are we using to determine the course our lives will take? And, how aware are we of all those decisions come to represent within our environment?

Wouldn’t it be interesting to “see” all the forces that are reshaping the world to meet the demands of the Western marketplace? All the lives impacted by our choices. The insistent chipping away at global resources. This sense in which, instead of the free unfolding of whatever interests lie within each of us, we’re living with a distorted suppression of individuals to fill the seemingly endless demands of others. (Notes One)

Doesn’t concern over efficiency and productivity tend to squeeze the life out of things, until we’re just the carefully managed faces of the machine? Forgetting, perhaps, that “all this” is only “there” to meet the genuine needs of human communities. Justifying all manner of things on the grounds that they’re simply part of the economy – this inevitable cycle of people seeking ways to make ends meet. (Notes Two)

If we stopped with it all, wouldn’t whole chunks of all that’s been built around this way of being come grinding to a halt? All the livelihoods, projections, expectations and identities constructed around the idea of this continuing. This strange bubble of unnecessary, indulgent, wasteful, impulsive consumption that seems to constitute so much of what’s going on.

Beneath it all, how many reasonable, constructive things are still happening? What’s left of those earlier notions of restraint, balance and harmonious coexistence? How much of our planet’s being consumed this way? Relationships between people and their countries strained as global production strives to fulfil our every whim.

Is it really the best way to be mapping our physical and psychological needs to the finite resources of any environment? Thinking that what we’re wanting somehow defines, completes or enriches our lives. With so much money and so many products changing hands on this basis, might it not be that we’ve taken a perfectly sustainable, beautiful world and decimated it with unbridled insecurity and greed?

Imagining, also, the bubble of all we’re thinking and feeling within this way of life, what are we generating? How meaningful is it to be living alongside one another like this, spending time as we are, with everything that’s running through our heads while we do so? If we were to strip all the nonessential, manufactured psychological elements out of the picture, what would be left? (Notes Three)

While we might, in many ways, simply be picking up where others left off, does that mean we shouldn’t be thinking things through for ourselves and deciding what we truly want our lives to be part of? Hopefully, finding ways to actively uphold the principles needed to construct and sustain a healthy way of being.

Notes and References:

Note 1: Do markets create strange social forces?
Note 1: Values, compromise & how things are
Note 1: How would we like to live?
Note 1: Who gets to define us
Note 2: Value and meaning in our lives
Note 2: Does it all come down to money?
Note 2: Humans, tangled in these systems
Note 2: The value we’re giving to things
Note 3: Solving all the problems we’re creating
Note 3: How much is in the hands of the market
Note 3: Lacking the human side of community?
Note 3: All we’re expected to understand

Ways to share this:

The wonderful precision of language

It may be nothing new, but isn’t it amazing how we have words for every conceivable concept, mood, situation, gesture or action? Shades of meaning to capture all the nuance of human behaviour, experience or perception. The concerns of each group expressed through the vocabulary they’ve developed to convey how they see life and feel about what they find there.

As if “all human experience” is matched by language to encapsulate it – our lives surrounded by the words we select from to create the thoughts and speech accompanying it. Choices we make becoming the narratives we’re living with, the meaning we’ve assigned and must work through. Aren’t we “always” bringing meaning to life through how we choose to label, interpret and respond? (Notes One)

Yet the idea of applying the right words – precise estimations of honesty, weight or respect – to whatever situation we’re in doesn’t seem easy. Aren’t we often “misusing” language for effect? Adding drama to serve our psyche, needs or agenda in ways that almost seem to bend reality to what we’d like to make of it. As if, with our words, we either reflect or distort the world. (Notes Two)

Given we have terms ideally suited to any situation, it’s interesting we might choose not to use them. All the ways we might be imprecise, less than honest, or fall back on generalities. As if, despite having this rich repertoire of options to convey life’s complexity, we’re not able or willing to apply them.

Of course, language being about common understanding, it makes sense we’d use terms those around are familiar with: communication hardly works when messages aren’t received. But, if we’re trying to have “one conversation” about all the realities we’re involved in and concerned about, aren’t we limiting ourselves if we snip out much of what language offers? (Notes Three)

Sometimes it just seems we’re not making the most of opportunities to communicate – that, instead, life’s full of language used for other purposes. Isn’t it tiring to be surrounded by meaningless content? Constantly using our faculties of hearing and cognition to filter through the unnecessary in case there’s anything valuable within. All this performance or argument that frequently takes the place of dialogue.

As humans, experiencing life and coating it with words, how often do we really get to say what we think and have others take the time to hear what we truly mean? That kind of detailed, subtle conversation where the inner life of one becomes the shared reality of another as “life” gets cast in the light of individuals and whatever’s burning brightest in their soul. (Notes Four)

If language helps transform reality into something we can talk about, isn’t it perhaps one of our most valuable tools? This ability to reach beyond the confines of the self to pool our humanity within one big ongoing conversation. To hear what life is like for all those experiencing it, grasp the meaning of all we’re engaged in, and form decisions on that basis.

Notes and References:

Note 1: With our words, do we cast spells?
Note 1: The battlegrounds of our minds
Note 1: All that we carry around with us
Note 2: The stories that we hear
Note 2: Reading between the lines
Note 2: How much do intentions matter?
Note 3: Things we give voice to
Note 3: Diplomacy and knowing where we stand
Note 3: Connecting truthfully with life
Note 4: Can there be beauty in communication?
Note 4: Voices within cultural life
Note 4: Words & relating as paths to change

Ways to share this: