In Search of Wisdom
Yesterday was the anniversary of my uncle’s death. My grandmother cooked (again) an awesome amount of food (in the Chinese tradition, we offer food to our deceased). All in the wish to take care of her eldest son, even after death.
It left a dull ache in my heart.
Don’t let that negativity get you down. The future belongs to those who can turn lead into gold.
It’s uncanny how our words build us.
My friends and I met up for dinner recently; all four of us used to be heavily involved in one organization’s work, but while three of us had already left long ago, one had only just.
And I was really surprised to hear the kind of words she was using, the kind of words that I hadn’t heard for a while. They were the kind of words that reminded me of issues, and of people as figure-outable step by step machines, of long speeches that sounded wonderful but changed nothing, of people behaving like each other but nobody stopping to ask the hard question of who they really were deep inside, of things in the past holding them back and if only they could rid of them they would be free.
Bully, bollocks and bullshit. I hadn’t thought about those things for ages – and not because I’d grown perfect, but because I’d changed my vocabulary, and thereafter changed the culture I lived in.
Words build cultures, and cultures build people. Choose them carefully, like people you’d entrust with your deepest secrets.
To be a writer, you have to love the sound of your words, not the sound of your voice.
I must have watched this hundreds of times as a kid, but I’d completely forgotten how jazzy it was, and how British everyone is.