I've always had a healthy respect for the power of words.  It started when I was a child, growing up with books as my only friends.  I loved sitting in my room for hours and letting the written word take me to places all over the universe.

When I was younger, it was Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and The Sea that taught me about manhood, and Jack London's Call of The Wild that made me love the natural world.

As I got older, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book taught me about loyalty, and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time showed me the power of faith.

I like to think of these books as my first Dharma teachers.

In college, my love of words turned into a love of debate.  I joined my school's Parliamentary Debate team, and it was terrific fun!  If your opponent said something you disagreed with, you could loudly yell, "For shame!" and if you wanted to support your debate partner in their arguments, you could shout "Here, here!" to help them emphasize a point.

We debated in teams of two with one team being the government and the other team being the opposition.  And there was a single moderator or judge who would both provide the debate topic and decide the winner.  It was the government's job to flesh out the debate topic, define key terms, and make a case, which the opposition would attempt to refute.

The first round was critical because who ever controlled the definition of words controlled the debate.

For example, if the debate topic was, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander."  Then the government might choose to take that statement as a metaphor; defining 'goose' as a corporation and 'gander' as the employee and then defining those terms in a way that would strengthen their argument.

Naturally, the opposition would respond by coming up with their own definitions; which weakened the government's argument while simultaneously making their own argument stronger.  As a result, I spent very little time in college discussing actual debate topics, and a whole lot of time trying to pin down the exact meaning of words.

Who ever came up with definitions that the judge liked best would inevitably be the winner.  It was through my experiences on the debate team that I learned something mind-blowing.

Words don't actually mean anything.

That is to say, there is no final, all-encompassing definition that everyone abides by for words like good, bad, or balloon.  Even if you check the dictionary you just find words being used to define other words, and if you read for long enough, you inevitably wind up back at the word you started with.

Language is nothing more than a circular logic algorithm.  A nonsensical mess of symbols and sounds that we use to describe an existence that we can never truly understand.  But knowing that doesn't keep me from sitting down at my laptop every night, writing words, and loving every minute of it.

Language is an illusion, but that doesn't stop it from being real.

I've been thinking about this lately in relation to our national discourse.  There are a lot of words being thrown around these days like gun control, immigration, protests, etc.  People are very attached to these words; so much so that they say and do hurtful things to one another.

It's sad, but I suppose it can't be helped.  In order for people to agree on anything they first have to agree on the meaning of the words they're using.  And most people don't really know what they're saying.  Sure, they may have strong feelings about a topic.  But it's my experience that if you ask for a clear, concise definition of terms that will hold up in a parliamentary debate, they've got nothing.

So I've chosen to hang up my debating boots.  I have my beliefs, and I strive to live in accordance with them, but I've stopped using words to try and make others behave as I think they should.

Instead, I choose to live in the space between words; the space before thoughts and aversion muddy the waters of life.  It's easy to do.  I just sit on my cushion, close my eyes, and breathe.

Eventually, I leave my attachments and definitions behind, finding myself in a place of stillness; a place that only exists between the last word of a sentence... and the period.

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The Space Between Words