Our Pauses

Do we know beyond the boundaries of language(s) we speak ?

Quite often, I went through emotional experiences I can’t read or understand. It does not happen when I am solitary and living to myself alone; it does happen when I am in the market, with the people or I am travelling long distances. Maybe, there are Nature-designed pauses in the continuum of my consciousness, or maybe I simply don’t know the silent part of me.

Sometimes, when I sit to write I feel terribly different but I can’t language that pre-writing or in-writing moments. Some other time, when I interact with my family and I observe the lives of different people around me, it becomes seriously difficult for me to bring those lives into words. I stumble upon the idea that language too, much like money, does not speak for the poor. Maybe I appear too hard on the language, however, it is possible that our experiences are too original and too personal to be put in words, those speak and write in general tone.

To be frank, when we decide to do a language for our emotions and experiences; right at that moment, we put us into the shoes of others. Our experiences are our own; do we have the audacity to claim that our words are our own too? Our feelings are contextualized in a life where we exist and words are also part of that context too, but sometimes we do feel that there should be words or language different than we have had at the moment to express what we are through. We find language, the social context of our existence, unable to document our suffering, happiness, or moment of realization. Does not this bring us to an idea that scheme-of-being-human is much larger and complex than the scheme-of-words at our disposal?

Here, I believe, at the juncture of our-being-human and words-we-language lies the intellectual and creative challenge. Words may or may not create new ideas, but a genuine idea can create fresh possibilities for the growth of words. If we try to be honest with our experiences and our emotions, there might emerge the possibilities of developing unique expressions of our own. But is it so easy?

There are commonalities too between language and us-as-human. We both evolve with time; we both can’t exist without context; we both love diversity; we both adapt to newer climate, newer cultures; we both procreate and we both experience the possibilities of new life and miserable death.

I believe we may read ourselves but can we write ourselves too is not a straightforward question. There are pauses in us- the silent pauses, the long pauses and short pauses- when things get so much difficult for us to describe. Rather than blaming language for this illiteracy of us, we should appreciate that we human are much more complex than the way our language present us to the world, and

…our originality may lie in those silent pauses when we find it hard to language our emotions and experiences.