one word too many

The more words people add to their vocabulary, the less they start making sense. Words are picked up not to make things clear, but to obscure them. It’s like a weapon that was supposed to protect but turned into a killer. In conference halls around offices, in schools and in politicians’ speeches, in court room orders and bureaucrats’ notices, in doctors’ diagnosis and in our conversations, words are being employed very effectively to say anything but what really is. The need to be untruthful may have been the single most driving factor behind a vocabulary’s development. We were doing fine as 2-year olds. Saying yes and no. Asking for this or that, telling what we liked and what we disliked in plain and simple words. And then as we grew up we discovered we could presume, we could hazard a guess and put things mildly. We cloaked simple affirmatives and negatives under layers of words. We say a lot when we want to mean the least. Like now, when all one is trying to say is to keep things short, simple and true to their meaning.

For A Second

The present is a cross between a rear-view mirror and a crystal ball. Something’s led us this far and this is what will lead us on to whatever we end at. Today is a result and today is raw material. Today is what is and it is what will be. It was formed out of all moments to this moment and it is just a moment in a pile that will be the next. It’s forming, it’s breaking, it’s adding, it’s dropping in on several other moments and forming a shape but only for a moment. And the very next moment it will be part of an unformed picture. It is the present and it is just there for this long and it will then move on, carrying us with it.