Today, I would like to share a very personal and painful story with you. This is the first time that I have ever shared this private memory, and even today, it all still seems surreal. When I was in high school, I was walking to class one chilly morning with my best friend Kevin. We were about to cross a busy street leading to the main lecture hall when I saw a white sheet of notebook paper blowing towards me in the wind. As I stopped to catch the paper, Kevin stepped out onto the roadway and a drunk driver in a pickup truck ran a red light and killed him. I remember standing there in total shock with this piece of paper in my trembling hands when I suddenly noticed the words scrawled in black ink across the paper. The paper read, “Life is a gift”. Thinking about this now still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I will come back to this story in a bit, but first I would like to digress and talk to you about the power of words.
I often think about words. As a writer, they are my medium for painting my thoughts and emotions on a blank canvas of white paper. When I think about the power of words, I am reminded that words have a purpose in life. There is a reason language was developed.
Thinking about the origin of language, I imagine a group of cavemen (and cavewomen) grunting and snorting in attempt to communicate, until one day, some caveman had the idea to give a unique sound to label a particular object. In that small moment in time and space, language was born. And, that is what the purpose of language really was…to provide a verbal symbol to represent a real object.
I imagine the first objects given names were important things like “fire”, “water” and “food”. You see, during the initial development of language, words only existed as a representation of something real and necessary. The object was real and words were just the object’s shadow.
The power of words expanded when people exploited another attribute of language. As symbolic sounds, words could be carried anywhere, and soon the need for the object they represented was no longer necessary. So, if a caveman needed to communicate something about a piece of flint, but he didn’t have any in his possession to demonstrate what he was talking about, he could just use the word “flint” to convey the idea to another caveman. Objects were no longer necessary as words started to replace them. I liken this unto the change in society when people traded goods for goods (trading objects of real value) to the practice of using currency (trading representation of value). Words invented to be a mere shadow of reality were soon treated as reality itself.
While this phenomenon undoubtedly had several useful purposes, it also gave a potent and unnatural power to words. Please allow me to bring my example full circle. The “personal and painful” story you read at the beginning of this post…well, the truth is that Kevin didn’t really die that day. In fact, I never had a friend named Kevin in high school and to be honest none of what you read ever happened, and that is exactly my point. By reading my words, these mere reflections of reality, our caveman minds still translate words as being real, and you no doubt gave them a physical existence within your own mind. They may have even evoked an emotion within you just like real objects do.
When we give credibility to words that have no real existence, then they cost us precious mental energy and can divert our focus away from the areas in our life where we can be most effective. When you feel yourself captured by a particular event that is arousing your thoughts and emotions, ask yourself a few questions to help test the validity of your thoughts. How much of the situation have I personally witnessed? How do the circumstances really affect me and my plan for life? Are there any future tasks or repercussions that I need to address? Do I need more information about the situation? Asking these questions can help lead you to an objective conclusion of whether or not you are dealing with something real or if you are listening to empty words.
I challenge you to pay more attention to the words you hear and speak everyday. Don’t let empty words that are full of emotion create a sense of reality that does not actually exist. Seek what is real and true in your life. Go out and experience the world. Live it. Feel it. Then, communicate it.