The power of language: Reality and Belonging
It’s clear language can make or break a sensitive conversation. Microaggressions can be laid out like mines across a person’s speech. By using words like, crazy and insane, we can invoke emotions and images. These images revolve around the environment in which they are said and in the tonality in which they are delivered. While controlling one’s own tone and environment can be a difficult task, selecting which words to submit and omit from conversation can be the easier option when presenting ideas of something as foreign as losing touch with reality.
Being the deep thinkers we are, we often find value in dissecting and explaining words like “reality” when they arise. For what even is reality? We’ll try to use the power of language to capture this big, elusive fish. We’ll cast our net wide, loose enough to bend with the waves of personal subjectivity, but tight enough to actually feel like we have objectively harnessed something special, something relatable.
Going too wide means that anything and everything is reality. Death, love, existence, the absence of existence, all shapes and colors of the dreams we have ever had the pleasure of knowing. But this eternal and infinite universe of reality is not one to inhabit in the waking world, while partaking in daily routines and rituals, because as we have learned through experience--there is a necessity for patterns, if we are to predict the tides of our ancestors. We must narrow our focus when catching our fish.
On the other hand, going too narrow means that reality is rigid and absolute in the objective consensus of the organized convention. It is the loss of creativity and the stubborn fixation on the trivial pursuit to relate to others without ever knowing yourself. It is the following of orders, when you know in your gut that it is wrong. This morality of separateness allows new knowledge to be born.
This subjectivity and objectivity of the human experience, the in and out of magnification, of individual among group, is the balance of reality. If we ever plan to survive in a world inhabited by the absolutes of abstraction on one end and fixation and the other end, then we must be able to walk along the spectrum, finding balance and mastery of belonging. The freedom to leave the group is also the empowerment to stay in the group.