Transience in Knowing
The first passage in the Tao Te Ching as translated by Stephen Mitchell.
We all know the feeling of asking ourselves, “What’s that word again?”
To make sense of our multifaceted world, words have been created out of thin air to describe nearly every aspect of our lives.
Over time, these words have come to bear significant weights behind them both with liberating and confining potential.
While words simplify our daily lives, I question if it contradicts the natural flow of being.
Everything in our life ebbs and flows, twirling around in a circle of birth and death of our affairs, and our grasp on reality.
I question if words without meaning can clip the wings of our potential to shapeshift into new expressive identities.
Perhaps words with rigid meanings impose barriers against our ability to weave ourselves in and out of life’s threads.
When we see something only as the word of which it is called, we may dismiss our curiosity and fail to follow through on our questions - “how did what’s in front of me become this word?” or “whatever is tied to this word, does it have the potential to evolve into something more?”
Our attachment to words may make us more inflexible and even less imaginative of what the meanings attached to them could shift into.
For example, looking at a cloud, one person could see a phoenix and another could see a shooting star. It depends how they see the cloud.
It doesn’t mean that one person is wrong and the other is right.
And even more awe inspiring, is that in that moment the cloud has the potential to be both.
By Arabella Davis
How do you view the connection between words and their meanings?