Wordy… Or Unwordy…

While we use words to describe life experiences, some are simply beyond words. Are these two separate paradigms?

A poet picks the choicest of words and weaves them together to come up with a garland which one admires for all it reveals and hides at that same time….

A leader chooses words in a fashion that lifts a curtain off our minds and makes us realise the intensity of possessing an imagination…

Words- the ever-present entities

The universal actor working par excellence in the above are..‘words’!  They are a fascinating entity of our everyday lives, lighting up every second of it. If I am not hearing or reading words, I am writing or thinking of them. Just being able to read and write I am exposed to so much of this chaos.

Being a native of one state, brought up in another and married to a person from yet another state, my chaos of words has a multiple personality disorder. So my words keep jumping fences and crossing boundaries drawn on any geographical map.

Words are a catapult for my thoughts to come alive. Sometimes I don’t find words to describe what I am feeling, and I get lost in my thoughts. Then some new words find their way into my life and help the stranded thoughts reach its destination.

These new words like friends pop up anywhere! Sometimes they are in a book, sometimes in a poem, sometimes in a song, sometimes in a scene in a movie or sometimes during a conversation with an unknown person. Lately I have also realised, when I cross boundaries and look at new languages, my arena of sorting the thought is widened. And once I have consumed these words, new thoughts emerge.

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There are also times when I find words bogging me down. Negative news, or people talking ill about an issue, or about life in general pulls me in a direction I don’t want to go. The words that come out from a space of fear and anxiety tend to have a longer life than words that spring from happiness and peace.

Wondering why this is the case, I ventured into another realm of ‘experiencing the words’. I realised, every word invariably has an experience attached to it. So, death, disease, pain, are any day, heavier words with a longer lives than creation, fun and laughter!

Do some experiences surpass wordings?

But are these ‘words’ the only magical entities that comprise the world? Can there be more to this world?

The tight hug my daughter gives me before going to bed…

The painter stroking colours out of his brushes emerging into a beautiful sunrise…

The breath that leads your body into a superbly aligned yogic pose…

All these are experiences sans words.. actually experiences where, words fall short. These experiences usually for me don’t cling on to any words and thus seem to live longer. There cannot be data analysis on these experiences as even holding them intact in a word is not possible. But, I know for sure that these experiences don’t have the chaos that exists in the ‘wordy’ world.

Here its okay to go wrong. Whatever mood I am in, when my daughter just grabs me and hugs me out of the blue, I melt into a smile. If there’s a tinge of blue in the sunrise, it can be covered by another coat of yellow and still would make a beautiful sunrise. When the body is trying to get into the yogic pose, there are mistakes, but it still makes up a complete journey of finding yourself.

 I don’t even know if the source of these pure experiences are ‘thoughts’? Most of them are just feelings that manifest without any words in the background. I have tried to search for the words later and have found it very limiting, in whichever language. Although I just like it to be that way.. ‘unwordy’.

Listening to instrumental music without words or the aakar of a classical singer without knowing the sur he/she is touching has a mysterious cloud to it. You can fill in with any emotion you want to in that moment. There seems to be no binding in these experiences. And the expanse is haunting. The beauty of this ‘unwordy’ space is that it is long lived; somewhere I think it beats the heavy weight of negative words too, in their life span.

The best of both worlds

Can both of these worlds exist together? They probably can. However for me, I switch between the two as I feel one overtakes the other in their dual presence. For me the word world is loud and glaring and I need to get away from it to enter into the ‘unwordy’ one. And when I want the wordy world again, I step back into it.

The ‘wordy’ world is very definite, predetermined and structured. When I talk it’s the words that I already know. When I listen it’s the words the speaker already knows. When I write, it’s the thoughts that I have already formed and when I read something new, it’s the thoughts the writer has already made. They might seem new, but I find it all in the ‘past’ – repackaged and brought up again and again.

When I move to the ‘unwordy’ world, it’s an undefined, unknown, and spaced out stage. There is spontaneity to make anything of these moments. And every time you have these moments, you can feel something fresh and new. The wordy world is easily accessible to everyone, the ‘unwordy’ a little difficult and one that begs the need to be sentient.

It’s like the plant whose roots, trunk and leaves are all expressed and visible; however when a dew drop settles on her leaf in the dawn of a misty morning, the plant can feel the whole world around her within that tiny drop!

First published here.

Picture credit- Wilhei

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