Words have a very strange way of being thrilling, inspiring and absolutely terrifying all at the same time. As Albus Dumbledore once said, “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.” (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). This quote has always stuck out to me. I think this is mostly because I absolutely love the Harry Potter series and it has made me feel like a part of the magic. But it has a lot of truth to it. I have so much power in something that I use everyday. I can use my words to love or to harm, to uplift or to tear down. Words have so much strength, yet we frequently throw them out without thinking of the damage we could be causing and often not recognizing the lives we could be changing.
It's incredible to think that just 26 letters in the English language can be combined in infinite patterns with infinite meanings. With the same letters you can tell someone "I love you" or "O evil you" which is a really silly example. But 8 letters when rearranged can have entirely different meanings. So it just makes sense that we should put a lot of care into the way we organize them.
And we have the power to use words every day of our lives. We are able to shape the world around us by the way we rearrange a compilation of 26 characters. And we forget that we have this power. We take it for granted and we misuse it. And sometimes we don't use it at all.
Silence can often be even more powerful than words themselves. And sometimes in silence we lose the power we could have had.
The power of silence is that it allows for thought. When we are constantly talking, we allow little time for us to think about what we are saying. I've been known to ramble, especially when I feel uncomfortable. In these times I lose sight of my thought process and just allow words to escape without full acknowledgement of what I may be saying. If I were to be more silent in these times, I could conjure up words that I really want to say. Words with more meaning and strength, rather than incomplete or incoherent notions which poured out of my mouth before I knew what I was doing. Silence also gives the listener time to think. Just imagine if we felt more comfortable with silence, how much more meaningful our interactions would be. We could think more clearly and communicate more efficiently.
Yet, we find ourselves struggling to allow silence. We have to be constantly engaged and active in our interactions. We've deemed silence as "awkward." Some people feel so uncomfortable with these silences that they choose to break them, even if they aren't adding anything meaningful. We destroy the silence to make ourselves feel more comfortable in the moment, when we could be allowing the silence to continue to improve our future.
Because the truth is silence can be so healing. It gives us time to compose ourselves and come to terms with whatever we may be dealing with. It allows us to think clearly and organize our thoughts. But it can also be damaging. There always comes a point in time when silence needs to be broken. And often we get to that point and we shut down. We allow the silence to continue for longer than we should and this can be dangerous.
The more negative side of silence's power is the time it allows us to dwell on our thoughts. Yes, it can heal, but it can also hurt. And when we are given too much time to think about certain things, we can end up coming to stressful conclusions. Its incredible how silence, the absence of noise which is essentially nothing at all, can fill up a room and cause us to suffocate.
And when we are the one's elongating the silence, we are giving up our power. We are allowing other individuals to interpret our thoughts and feelings. Essentially we are handing over the power our words could have and we are allowing them to interpret something we haven't even said. And when we do this, we know we are giving up our power and we know that these individuals will jump to conclusions and allow themselves to suffer, all while we have the words that could clear the air. Yet, sometimes we get prideful or scared that our words may just be too damaging to share.
The truth can definitely hurt, but the absence of the truth can be even worse. And as hard as it is to tell the truth or come forward about feelings or confess wrongdoing, it is so important that we do it. And it is so essential that when we do break the silence, we do it at the right time and with the right words. And we will mess up and we will hurt people, but we will learn and we can do better.
Make sure your words are thought out and make sure they will do good. Allow for silence, but know when to break it. It's not an exact science, it's more of an art, or even magic, that we have not yet mastered. And we just have to keeping trying.
Yesterday, one of my professors took the opportunity to spend the entire two hour lecture focusing on graduate school and our future in psychology. He spoke on the things that helped him throughout his career, how grit, intellect, and practice interact to create success. He gave us incredible advice, but in all honesty, this class period was just plain exhausting. I felt like I was on a roller coaster of emotion and stress. His words terrified me, discouraged me, uplifted me, and inspired me all at the same time. Ultimately, I left the class confused as to what I want, but somehow still determined to discover it.
One of the things he shared was that we need to find the thing that we think about when we don't have anything else to think about, and then pursue that. We will most likely live our entire lives doing one thing. It makes no sense to be doing something that we do not love or believe in. But the trouble here is finding what that is, what we think about when we don't have to think about anything else. And the truth is, I don't really know what that is. And that terrifies me as well. After two decades of life, I am being forced to choose what I would like to spend the rest of my life doing. And though I have direction, I'm still incredibly confused.
And I honestly just don't want to decide right now.
Right now, I want to travel the world. I want to discover beauty in nature, in humans, in service. I want to try new foods. I want to do new things and live life on the edge. I want to skydive. I want to ride a motorcycle. I want to swim with dolphins and learn to play the ukulele. I want to dye my hair purple and kiss a stranger. I want to live on the beach and only care about the sand between my toes.
I want to live for myself right now, not for myself in the future. And that may seem incredibly irresponsible. But how am I ever going to discover my purpose, my loves, or my beliefs if I haven't even discovered myself?
You always hear about how college is a time for self-discovery. Yet, I feel more like I am being stifled than being given the opportunity to explore.
But exploration takes resources that I don't really have, money and time that I cannot afford to spend. And the truth is, I don't think I could do it. As much as I want to, dropping everything and taking a break would be just as scary as not doing so. I don't know how to live without a plan for the future. Ever since I was a child, I've been conditioned to plan and prepare for things. My elementary education was preparing me for middle school, my middle school education was priming me for my high school IB program. The IB program was entirely focused on my success in college.
My English teacher my junior year of high school drove the idea that we must begin everything with the end in mind. This makes a lot of sense. You're only going to get somewhere if you know where you're going. But what if the end you have in mind, isn't actually what you expect it to be? Then you've taken an entire journey to arrive at a place you don't want to be. So maybe we shouldn't begin with the end in mind, or perhaps that end shouldn't be so specific. Maybe we should begin with the journey in mind. That way, we are able to live in the moment and enjoy the time we have. Because the truth is, you never know if that journey is going to be cut short, if you'll hit roadblocks, or if you'll end up having to turn around. I think that if we focus on the journey we're taking and not where it's taking us, we just might end up where we want to be. And I have a hard time accepting that. My whole life has been future oriented. And that isn't necessarily a problem, but it keeps me from experiencing and appreciating those experiences.
When we focus our energy on the future, we forget the present. And the truth is now is what really matters. The past and the future are just thoughts we are having in the present. The present is what we have right now, so we should probably make as much of it as we can.
