Knowing It and Knowing About It: the Nonverbal and the Verbal
The less mysterious it is, the easier you can talk about it.
But life without mystery is an illusion, merely a head trip.
And love without mystery, are you kidding me, can that even be called love?
And so what is most precious to us can not be (fully) put in words. Even the best words won’t do.
Approach life, or love, like a scientist, a geek, a fan, a lover, and you learn more each day, but you never know all, and you never find the words that say all that you know. For language is only a part of knowing; and it demands a certain detachment from your topic.
You choose life over detachment — always. You choose love over detachment too. We are wired this way. (Until we unlearn it, but that is another story. Many of us stay natural and instinctively choose love and life over detachment and keep doing it, because it feels right.)
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Now here is an interesting observation… Do with it what you like:
The more involved you are with life, or with a love, the more you struggle with the verbal to define it.
The easier you talk about it, the less involved you are.
A writer and a good speaker could be even more aware of it than a person who doesn’t need to communicate:
The more intimate you are with life, with love, any alive thing, the less inclined you are to limit it with language.
Unless you are determined to meet the challenge to describe it — for someone else to know about it.
So we talk of things that we know are vital and that the verbal mind can retell only humbly and incompletely. And while we share, we trust mystery to reveal to us another layer of itself.
7 June 2015
Art by © Erik Johansson, Self-Actualization
