LABEL THIS

I've been thinking about language a lot lately. It's a pretty incredible concept, sounds and symbols that we have assigned to represent the entirety of the universe. And ask anybody, I love words, I talk so much I annoy myself. I think it's this drive to try and capture this crazy life and share it that makes me talk so much, and that is the point of this post.

I can NEVER share these experiences perfectly. Try as I may, nobody captures the true feeling and essence of an event through words. Try to explain your first kiss to someone. Try and tell them how that injury REALLY hurt. Make them feel it... But you can't. It's like trying to describe 'green' to someone that has never seen the color. It's like trying to convey the pain in your favorite artists song when they sing it to someone who hasn't heard it. You just can't do it. But leave it up to words to be prepared. The term for that is ineffability, not being able to put something into words.  Not being able to put something into words has a word to describe itself, and is itself all at once. It's ironic.

 The issue is that we take these words we hear, and THINK that we understand them, but they are concepts, abstract ideas, and everyone interprets them differently, despite having the same 'definitions'. The perfect example of this is labels, stereotypes, groupings of any kind, and that is what is upsetting to me. These arbitrary ideas and drawings that we have assigned meaning to carry a perceived weight that is outside of reality. How can you explain something so dynamic as life or love or pain or death in static, one word terms? You can't even begin. Similarly, when you hear certain terms you jump to conclusions about them, in an attempts to expand the full experience into that term. For example, the term 'stupid'. If you hear that someone is 'stupid' you rack your mind for all the other characteristics, traits, and tendencies you have observed with other people you would have considered 'stupid' and attribute them to that other person, even if they are untrue.

In my opinion that is the the basis of stereotyping, and it is a dangerous thing. It's dangerous because it allows us to make assembly line judgments about people, without getting to know them on an individual basis. Think about yourself! How many labels could you put on yourself that have extreme characteristics attached to them, that don't apply to you. I've been called nerdy, popular, reckless, hippy, stoner, saint, sinner, sensitive, heartless and everything in between. And maybe I do have a few qualities from all of those labels, and more of them! But even all together these terms do no justice to describing ME. JEREMY. MILES. LAWRENCE. Even that name can't grasp everything about me. It's all a generalization.

 Labels can be useful, and sometimes even spot on, and I don't even advocate that we get rid of them. But next time you want to describe something or someone, or hear a label put on something or someone, remember that it is nothing more than a word, and really those words are shaky at best. Give everything, and everyone a chance on its own. We are all original combinations of the words used to describe us, and even more, so treat the world like that!

I think that life, love, pain, and death are the four biggest words I know, not in length or definition, but when you really think about the things these terms represent.

So when someone asks you about me, or anyone at all, I hope you tell them that you couldn't describe them if you wanted to.

 PEACE.