Words.

How often do words suffice, I wonder. Actions speak louder than words, they say. Language is a channel of expression bound within the limits of a dictionary. While names and definitions, in more ways than one, have been assigned to the variety of things, emotions, actions, beings, phenomena, sights, sounds, smells and the plethora of elements that constitute life, there still are felt emotions and happenings experienced that are seldom captured effectively in a string of letters that make up what are known as words.

A look of love, a warm touch, a note of music, the whiff of a scent

A memory, a melody, a prayer, a wish

A walk, an adventure, a journey, an experience

Comfort, pain, relief, frenzy, solace, satisfaction.

We look around, see, hear, feel, smell. We think, observe, contemplate, conclude, express. But words do not always provide a canvas good enough to paint a picture that appropriately and justifiably depicts the mosaic of stimuli felt deep inside the recesses of the heart and mind. Words are accessible, words are easy. Words are fed to us from childhood, not difficult to comprehend. Words have the power to make or break, create or destroy, inspire or depress, revive or kill- because we give them that power. 

Words present a certified collection of options to choose from, giving room for expectation of the most probable and favourable choices being picked to convey an emotion, thus sadly robbing expression of the romance in ignorance and the eventual surprise arising from usage of intangible modes of conveying emotion. “I love you” is all you want to hear, when all that you can feel is so much more than what those three words convey. Words restrict what we feel and express, for lack of words. The power of imagination gives wings to the power of words. If words were the perfect medium of expression, fuelling our wildest spans of imagination, would each one of us still be enamoured by life and its charms, by the reactions that people and situations evoke inside us, by the excitement of experiencing things ourselves for the first time? If words were indeed the perfect conveyors of emotion,

Books would satiate all of our emotional needs.

A man would know the feeling of a baby’s kick in the womb.

Beethoven’s symphonies would bring tears to a deaf man. 

The blind would revel in the beauty of the crimson sky at sunset.

The creator did enough to make us think and feel.The makers of language did enough to get us to say. 

Can we ever do enough to express?