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Today's
Meditation:
If anyone has ever known words, Hermann Hesse
has. He made a living from them, and he crafted them
very carefully to create works like Siddhartha and Die
Leiden des Jungen Werthers, one of the most
influential books in German history. I think that
what he says is very important because of the way that we
depend so much upon words to express our desires and
feelings, without stopping to consider just how
ineffective those words tend to be, even if we consider
them very carefully before we say them.
If we depend upon our words too much, eventually we're
going to learn just how limited they are. Our
feelings are incredibly complex, yet more often than not
our words are not. In addition to this limitation,
our words are also interpreted by others, and that
interpretation isn't always in sync with what we think
that we're saying.
I believe that this is one of the main reasons for which
it's very important that we practice our use of words and
actually make an effort to learn how to use them more
effectively. But even more importantly, we have to
be aware of the limitations of the words we use. If
we are aware of those limitations, then we can choose our
words more carefully and even acknowledge that they aren't
expressing our feelings as accurately as we would
like. If we do this, then we may be able to keep
certain situations from getting out of control or being
misunderstood.
Our words are very, very important to us. They're
important to us in our relationships, our jobs, our social
contacts, our creativity. When we are aware of the
limitations of those words, then we can take them
seriously and do our best to use them in much better, much
more effective ways.
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