Schindlersword

Word Users Manual

Words are: The difference

Like the elements, cells, common senses, eyes, and brain before, words are a gift we’re meant to keep. Sure, it can be stored away unopened, but that is not what gifts are for.

Especially considering words are the only difference between them and us.

What about the other candidates?

To believe what makes us unique is the upright walk, disposable thumb, naked skin, Cambrian explosion, aliens, or the size of our brains would be forgetting they are words.

Wisdom and all that jazz?

To believe wisdom, creativity, intelligence, brains, choices, decisions, organizations, knowledge, and response-ability are what separates us from the wordless would be forgetting if the wordless were lacking creativity, each cloud would be identical, all nuts would be hazel, all birds would be swans, and we wouldn’t be here. After all, we are the wordless’ idea, not our own.

If acorns didn’t know what they want, there’d be no oak trees.

Technology?

Sure, the wordless don’t have self-driving cars, house-cleaning robots, atomic bombs, license-plate flippers, and social media. Why they stubbornly continue without is a mystery. Maybe they don’t see the point. They have invented us, surely they could have invented an atom bomb. Be it as it may, the wordless didn’t wait for us to get started with space travel, for that is how the elements got here. And they know all about the weather, for they are the weather, and Wi-Fi isn’t needed, it seems, because they haven’t bothered with wires in the first place

In common

100% of what we are—cells and water, fire, air, and earth—we have in common with the wordless.

Words are the difference. We can talk about it.

Words describe the world perfectly

How often is that true?

To believe words describe anything, let alone the world, let alone perfectly, is to believe in an optical illusion.

To describe anything takes a scribe. And like every scribe before, it will find words only describe other words, poorly, and that the above ant, butterfly, cat, and dog, both depicted and described, are merely examples.

Our ancestor

If the first to speak the first word on Earth was an animal, as opposed to a plant, fictional character, or mountain, it is safe to conclude it is our ancestor and we are its children.

400 generations later, just like our ancestor did 10,000-plus years ago, we still arrive into this world wordless, and like our ancestor, it still takes us a while to speak our first.

Simplify

The great thing about words being the only difference between us and the rest of Earth is you can simplify your world without having to wait for the world to change first.

Words are: Free

Except when a word is made key and offered back to you at a price, words are free.

Kidding aside, it is not about keywords. The point is: The freedom of words is under threat.

Freedom stops where the freedom of others begins, that is the trade-off. Therefore, freedom isn’t merely a precious thing to have, but a precious thing to trade-off with.

Where freedom is, the abuse of freedom lags never far behind. But things have changed. What used to be the private reserve of monopolies, and conglomerates, the abuse of freedom is now open to anyone with a smart phone.

It doesn’t take rocket science, I think to notice that the demand for more tolerance for the intolerant is on the rise, just as are the efforts to narrow the limits of what words can be used, why, how, and when, and what not.

I think the free exchange of words is already under enough threat as it is.

Free words.

Let’s do it for the children.

Word is: Placebo

Wordless

In the wordless world, placebo doesn’t exist for self-evident reason.

Wordy

Among the wordy, everything a placebo can do — it can change your blood pressure, your mood, your heart rate, your focus, or your thoughts, to name a few — a word can do faster. Which might explain words’ uncanny ability to influence us more than an influencer can.

Of course, words can save lives and do a million other things that placebos cannot, however, knowing it is a placebo is identical to knowing it is a word. It isn’t the end of the placebo or of the word, but it is the end only of how you used to respond to it.

Placebos are everywhere — animals, mountains, and toys that talk, promised lands, reality, social media, fake news, artificial intelligence, and life, to name a few — and here to stay. Wishing them away is something only a moron would think about. The best you can do is have fewer of them.

For the ones we’ve fallen for it is too late for they have already worked their magic. Many a word-user’s blood pressure, mood, heart rate, focus, and thoughts have been successfully placebo-ed already.

But what will the word masters come up with next?

Your guess is as good as mine, but when you know it will be words, you are better prepared than most.

Words are: Stimulus

Stimulus-Response…

…describes what’s going on in the wordless and the wordy worlds alike.

Had we failed to respond to our most pressing stimuli — such as breathing in and out, staying alive, social media, fire, and the smell of fresh bread — we wouldn’t be here. Had the grass we walked on failed to respond, it wouldn’t be here. Asleep or awake, it seems stimulus-response happens everywhere 100% of the time.

I have no clue why that is. Nevertheless, I think it’s important because words play a big part in it.

Wordless

In the wordless world, words don’t exist for self-evident reasons.

Wordy

In the wordy world, we try to respond not only to every wordless stimulus, but also to words, at the same time.

Meditating on serenity will get you there.

“The serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – Serenity prayer

What you respond to, the stimulus, is outside of anybody’s control. We may call the weather anything we want, severe, mild, or boring, you cannot change it.

But how you respond is all up to you. There is no weather or third party involved.

That’s where your freedom is. But that’s not all.

Seeing the difference between stimulus and response also allows you to decide your response ahead of time, and when you do, many decisions are already made.

Words paint a different picture

We begin wordless, and even after that, only the area around our mouths becomes wordy.

Nothing on Earth even comes close

It is our fate. Words are a gift we’re meant to keep. We don’t have a choice. There is no escape.

The rest of us remains as wordless as it’s always been.

To connect, to be connected, and to stay connected with both the wordless and the wordy worlds, at the same time, this is as good as it gets.

Words aren’t involved in the word-users touching their face several hundred times a day without noticing it. And our words don’t know where we’re going. The knowing are our hands, faces and feet, just like the hands, faces and feet of the wordless, however, with a difference: We can talk about it. 

Nothing else on Earth even comes close.

Words are older than stories

Stories tend to get mistaken for evidence, and we often treat them that way.

Mistaking _____ (fill in the blank) for what it is not, is a common mistake, but that doesn’t make it right.

With stories, it is merely a mistake. But with words, well, it is beyond words because words are older than stories and, therefore, can tell you more about you than a story ever could.

For who you are, you have stories, names, family, friends, school, and government to help you figure it out.

But what you are is all up to you.

Many are struggling with it because it depends on whom you ask.

When you ask the internet, you are human, body, mind, spirit or, 25.27 billion results at Google.

When you ask stories, you are an accident, from Mars, from Venus, the 1, the 99, the world, the champion, and the list goes on.

When you ask words, you is you.

Before Words, you doesn’t exist for self-evident reason.

After Words, it is still only a word, nevertheless, you know first-hand how it came about, also known as knowing your roots.

Though an estimated 400 generations apart, we and our ancestor are one and the same — wordless in the beginning, wordy in the middle, and wordless again in the end.

Knowing your roots is as good as having them and, for that, words have stories blowing in the wind.

Word is: Missing

Although words are why we are here, they are missing from what we consider a historic event, an epic invention, a wonder of the world, a great story ever told, or a topic worth being taught at school.

The reason is simple: We don’t value things, we value their meaning.

Without meaning, nothing happens — which explains the current state of the word in the world.

Words are: Pictures

The wordless invented pictures long before they invented words to describe them with.

That, we know from cave paintings that are 30,000 years older than the first words on Earth. But it took the invention of many words before pictures could achieve what is now taken for granted:

A picture speaks a thousand words.

It’s not a magic trick, it’s what word-users do — they love to use their words.

Words are: Numbers

Numbers are a word-class apart for a number of reasons.

The wordless use them

Pine-cones, broccoli, lilies, roses, daisies, and marigolds, to name a few, have used the Fibonacci number, also known as the golden number, for as long as they can remember.

Without a brain? Before Fibonacci figured it out? Who would have thought? But that’s not all.

Numbers are clear

In contrast to the times a word-user mistakes a word for another, which is in the thousands, the times a word-user mistakes zero for one, or one for a dozen, can be counted on the fingers of a hand or two.

Things have changed

Mathematicians used to believe the universe is written in math and the uni-verse should be called uni-math instead. But things have changed. Even the mathematicians now agree math is a word.