Inside each one of us there are feelings and emotions; once in a while we try to talk about them, to speak them out, to write them down – to put them into words.
It’s usually a struggle, it hard, it’s like trying to put water in a straw basket: we will end up with a wet basket but without any water in it…
And such is the emotion; like water – slippery, it is difficult for us to catch them; to put them in words.
Many people think that their words could not portray their emotions. Some say: “you can’t talk about this, you have to feel it”, or, “I have no words for it”.
But here it will be written on the positive side of putting emotions into words; some of the great literature, poetry and theater plays – are doing just that, putting emotions into words.
To put something into words= is to give it a shape.
To give something a shape = is to give it life.
When we die, we lose our shape…
Wordless emotion, is like a ghost, (living in the gray area between the living and the dead).
To understand something is to give it a shape.
The shape allows something to be and is preventing it from getting wild and be spread all around.
This is the great paradox of life; we are limited by our shape, but that’s what allow us to exist. Without shape and contour – we have no individual existence. And when our emotions are having a shape (by putting them into words) we can let them be and also communicate them to others.
But words can mostly jail the emotions.
That happen when words are not in tuned with the essence of the emotion. This act does not give birth the emotion, but put them into a coffin.
That’s sometimes what happens in a psychological treatment or in an adult rational intellectual discussion: words can put emotion in an intellectual jail instead of trying to weave the appropriate skin and shape around them.
Putting emotions into words (either spoken or written) is a process that slows down their fast speed and thus makes them appear on the plan of our perception.
It is true that in this way they lose some of their originality, but at the same time – by giving it shape –it comes to life and is communicable.
Words are an incomplete device to give shape to the untenable. With it – in the media of communication – many conversations do not give a proper house to them; the words are empty, do not carry the rare commodity of meaning, a massage or indeed: emotions. And this is the difference between just a frequent chatter and a dialog – in the normal chatter the words are the main actor, a means for themselves, in dialog the words are only the embodiment of something hidden which they carry.
The emotions of two people meet through their dialog, for it is impossible for the emptions of two people to meet directly and without a mediator, incomplete as the mediator is.
When words and emotions meet – a rare happening is taking place – a real dialog.
When the spark of life ‘meets’ the body a rare happening is taking place – life is happening.
When the soul (Shakti in Hindu literature) meets consciousness (Shiva in Hindu literature) a rare happening is taking place – an awakening or a satori (in Zen Buddhism) or an enlightenment – is happening.
Gabriel