Use Your Words. Please.

It feels almost frivolous to write blog posts about my rarefied life in a world where people are being bombed out of existence and passenger jets are being shot out of the sky and genocides are quietly, systematically going on in various corners of the world and a virulent disease of horrific proportions is cutting a swathe through the people of West Africa. In fact, it doesn’t just feel frivolous: it sort of is.

But, as I so often have to ask myself, what else can I do?

Words, whether written or spoken, are among the most powerful weapons at our disposal. We can use them to rabble-rouse or to comfort; to propagandise or to tell the truth. We can use them calmly, or we can use them in the heat of anger. Sometimes, the same words can mean entirely different things, if said in two different tones of voice. Sometimes, too, writing words down can strip them of nuance and lead to misunderstanding. Two different people can have two entirely different, even contradictory, interpretations of the same written or spoken text, which means that words, our greatest treasure, can also be our biggest liability. Information is as vital a tool in our world as medicine or infrastructure or politics – nations and peoples can rise and fall depending on what words are in their holy books or on the lips of their leaders, and on how the people who hear or read these words understand what they are being told.

So, then, as a person who lives and breathes for words, perhaps I am not as helpless as I feel.

Of course, my sphere is very small, but I can choose what words to fill it with. The words I use go on to have a life without and beyond me, which means I must choose them carefully. My words are my only means of explaining myself to the world, and they will be my only legacy. I can hope that they will be understood as I intended them to be, but I know I have no control over that – once a word has left your pen, or your mouth, or your keyboard, and reached the eyes or ears of another, it is no longer yours. You are responsible for it, but it no longer belongs to you.

Photo Credit: Saint Huck via Compfight cc

I wish that world leaders could think about words this way. I wish those calling for war could consider that, in their need to ‘win’, they are throwing their own people on a pyre, and I wish they could be made to care that they are destroying lives and blighting the future. What good is it to stand triumphant over a smoking, blasted landscape? I wish those responsible for leading the world’s faithful could be more considered in the words they use, and the labels they choose to apply to others, and the interpretations they make of holy texts and scriptures. I wish people – those people with the loudest voices, and the largest platforms, and the greatest amount of words at their disposal – would use them more carefully, respecting their power, and being mindful of the consequences. Skewing the thinking of a people is not simply a game, or a way to win influence – it is dangerous, and something which can easily flare out of control, and it is wrong. It is also the easiest thing in the world to do, if one has the words and there are ears willing to hear.

I wish people would value doing right over being right. I wish they’d sacrifice the pleasure of shouting the loudest or the longest, or having the final word in an argument, or feeling like the one whose words are law, for the good of those who cannot speak.

This is why I am passionate about education and literacy. I believe people should be given the tools to distinguish between what they are being told, and the truth. I believe nobody should be forced to become reliant upon one source for the information they need to live their lives in peace. I believe people should be given the tools to make up their own minds, to come to balanced conclusions, to enter into rational discussion, and to understand that even though different peoples may speak different languages, the words are all the same.

All anyone wants is to live in peace, in relative prosperity, and to feel that they are safe. All anyone wants is to send their children out to play in the morning without fearing that they will never come home. All anyone wants is to have the dignity of a livelihood that is unthreatened by shells or tanks or rocket fire, or illness or militias or crushing rule. We have created a world where those who do not believe the same words that we do are ‘wrong’, whether those words relate to a god, or a political system, or an economic structure, or a history that may not have happened exactly as we have always been told. We have taken the greatest tool we have for bringing us together and turned it into the most efficient way of keeping us apart; if we’d had a blueprint for making everything wrong, we couldn’t have done a better job of it.

Words are powerful. My words, and yours. It is never too late to start using them.

I’ll Get By, With a Little Help…*

Ah, friends. They’re great, aren’t they? Indispensable, one might say. No matter what’s going on in your life, good or bad, if you have solid and dependable friends, you just know things will be fine. You can rely on them to be interested in your life, to get in touch, to want to hang out, to care, goshdarnit. Friends are the best.

Unless you keep a blog, that is.

One of my best friends dropped out to visit me yesterday, and we had a lovely time. We spent hours laughing, talking, drinking tea, and sharing our life’s burdens. Everything was going wonderfully until she admitted that she’s addicted to my blog. A good thing, you might think? Perhaps not, gentle reader. Perhaps not. ‘That’s why I don’t ring you any more,’ she joked. ‘If I want to know what you’re doing, I just have a read of the blog and it gets me right up to date again.’

Well. Did you ever hear the like of that?

One is not amused.
Image: patheos.com

I never anticipated this particular drawback to keeping a blog, I must admit. It’s easier to just summon up my words on a computer screen than it is to go to the trouble of making an actual telephone call – that’s undeniably true. So, in a way I can’t blame my friends for relying on the blog to keep themselves informed. However, it would be nice if they’d ring or text once in a while, just to say ‘Hey. How’re you doing?’ Is that really too much to ask, in this technology-saturated age in which we’re living?

Image: allposters.com

Anyway. The only upside to the whole thing was that we started to talk about things we might not normally discuss, like politics, perception of women in society, music, and so on. The fact that she already knew all the minutiae of my life meant that we were free to get stuck into the deep stuff, so that was a bonus. But it sort of felt like a cup of tea without that extra squeeze of the teabag, or a piece of toast that’s only half-buttered; something wasn’t quite right. The foundations were missing. Don’t get me wrong – it was fun, and brilliant, like all my conversations with this particular friend. But – I don’t know. It just felt weird.

Among the things we did discuss though, this friend and I, was the ageless topic of ‘Where Are They Now?’ We named as many girls from our old class at school as we could think of, and tried to work out if we knew whether they were married, if they had children, what had become of them, and where they were now. We realised that while we’d done an excellent job of staying in touch with one another, and our own tight little group of mates, we’d lost touch with a lot of people, too. We amused ourselves by sharing anecdotes and memories from school, dredging up a lot of stuff I thought I’d forgotten. And – of course – as is almost inevitable these days, one of these dredging missions dragged up a story idea. If we’d been too busy talking about me, and what I’d been doing, we may never have managed to start sharing our school memories, and – logically enough – today, I would be idea-less. I have the blog to thank for that, and I am truly grateful.

It’s sometimes strange to think that there are people all over the world reading the words that I write here. Sometimes  – as happened recently – a relative will tell me that they follow the blog, and that they read it whenever they can, and I’ll immediately start to feel flattered but also slightly embarrassed. I’ll wonder if they liked what they read. I’ll wonder if they think what I write is worth reading, or if they just cast their eyes over it out of a sense of duty or family loyalty. It’s easy to sit here and type out into the void, but when I think about all the eyes that take in the words I throw out, it makes my head spin a bit. (Admittedly, that might be due to still being rather unwell. I’m not completely back to myself yet!)

The blog, of course, would be nothing without its readers. Whether you know me in real life and read these musings because you feel you should, or whether you wouldn’t know me from a hole in the wall in real life and read the blog because you like it, I’m thankful. And to all my real-life friends – thanks for the support and the encouragement, and rest assured I’m not hoping you’ll get in touch just so I can rummage through our conversations looking for things to write stories about.

Well, maybe a little bit.

Anyway. I’m off to start working on the idea my friend sparked off in my head yesterday. Let’s hope it goes places!

 

*Just in case it wasn’t immediately obvious, this entire blog post is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, and no insult, injury, upset or offence is intended. If you’re a friend of mine in real life, rest assured I love you.