Our personal experiences, our thoughts and emotions, are almost entirely ineffable. There's a beauty in this tragedy though: what we experience is truly ours, nobody else can understand it 100.0%.
But we try. We use words and stories to try and convey as much of an episode or a thought as we can, but often they fall short. Remember the last time you tried to tell your best friend about that sublime experience you had? Your eyes shone, and your voice quivered with excitement as you told your epic tale, but all your friend could do was smile and nod.
Don't blame him. He did his best to understand, but words mean different things to you and I. We define the colour red as light with a wavelength between 620 and 740nm, but imagine a colourblind person who has been told that "this colour" is red his whole life when really all he sees is a motley assortment of greys. Now imagine this: he's telling you about a sea of "red" tulips he witnessed in Amsterdam, can you fully comprehend what the experience would have felt like through his eyes?
Well, again, we try. When words fall short, we use empathy to bridge the gap. This beautiful, intrinsically human, increasingly unique trait helps us put on other people's shoes and walk in them. Sadly, however, empathy is rare in this media-overloaded, consumption-driven, information-saturated age, and it is not something that can be taught or learnt; it must be discovered.
So how do we square this circle? With words. With precise juxtapositions and surgical punctuations. With exact adjectives and specific analogies. With emotion. And a touch of empathy.
This post is dedicated to words, specifically collections of them, that belie their length or ordinary usage, that go the extra mile, that do their bit and more, that tell more than just a story, that stimulate your imagination, that make the ineffable more effable and the world more human.
#sixwords - Stories Told In 6 Words
Painfully, he changed "is" to "was."
An only son; a folded flag.
I will not be your "sometimes".
Born twins. Graduated only child.
For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.
Because alcohol tastes better than tears.
A Bit Longer
You couldn't possibly know the thoughts that eat my mind.
The road to her heart is paved with the shards of past heartbreaks
Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not. (Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov)
How many times have you remembered an answer five minutes after the teacher tells you to stop writing, and a month later find out that you were one mark away from the top grade. Does that mean if you had remembered five minutes earlier that you be more qualified for that job you didn't get? ("I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate", Suli Breaks, here)
Witticisms
Kindness isn't kindness if you expect something in return.
The ballot is stronger than the bullet. (Abraham Lincoln)
I destroy my enemies by making them my friends. (Abraham Lincoln)
Where prejudice exists it always discolours our thoughts. (Mark Twain)
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. (Mark Twain)
Want to find your own?
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