A new Dictionary

I realise that language plays a key role in how we see and perceive the world around us, how we think about it and how we interpret it.

And of course, the premise of most of my work here is that The world changes when you change how you look at it, so in order for us to change how we see the world and build our own ‘culture’, why not start redefining language and words.

Why not start giving them new meaning, meaning that’s meaningful to us, that builds a stronger foundation of the kind of life we want to live.

I want to do this for myself and see how it goes:

• The first word I want to redefine is ‘work’.

  • When we talk about ‘work’, at least in my cultural upbringing, it’s always been more about something we’re supposed to do/have to do. It’s always about something that will take our effort and probably drain us. We always use ‘work’ as an excuse to not do something ‘fun’ or something we ‘want’ to do. That feels like such a shitty definition. Almost as if we’re not setting up ‘work’ in our lives to win mutually.
  • Why don’t we redefine work by understanding what it really is.
    • As per my awareness, ‘work’ is the process of giving value to the world.
    • Anything we work on, we’re trying to give back.
    • We also know that the best work happens from a point of view of abundance, from a view of love, curiosity and relentless optimism. Why is it so?
      • It must be so since work is just ‘service’, think about a NGO or a public organisation. If they had profit or any other motives, would they every be able to serve as much or as deeply as they do?
      • Think about you and your friends, if you always wanted something from them, would you ever be able to give to them in the way that you do, or form a relationship like such with them? No right!
      • So if this is the case, why not redefine ‘work’ as ‘service’. Just as all beings wake up and serve the world, serve the ecosystem, why don’t we do the same. Yes, the way they serve might have some mutual exchange taking place, but usually on an individual level, it’s just by being their most authentic selves, frankly, animals don’t even know any better.
        • I’m referencing Marcus Aurelius here too - see, Get out of bed
  • Redefinition: In my dictionary, ‘work’ has been replaced by ‘service’ with the context that it’s a pleasure and privilege to serve people around me. With the understanding that there isn’t ever anything that I’m ‘supposed’ to do, rather just infinite opportunities to ‘serve’ people around me, and that I wake up, to serve. For serving is just loving, and loving is just being one with the universe. (Read Alan Watts and you’ll understand).

• The second word I want to redefine is ‘I’, and ‘me’.

  • I want to be very cautious while using ‘I’ and ‘me’ in my language forward. I want to inculcate how nothing in the world exists alone, and that ‘I’ and not seperate from nature itself. This is a concept from Alan Watts’ books, and I’ve read similar sounding concepts in other books.
  • It’s also to discard any sense of identity that ‘I’ have, since identity comes with a life-lie or life-story, which comes with it’s own desires , motives and expectations. When you have no identity, you have no baseline, then everything the universe throws towards you can pleasantly surprise you.
  • What do I want to replace it by?
    • By ‘we’. Just to forge in the fact that I’m not alone, and I don’t exist alone here. And use that as much as I can.
    • It also allows us to be more empathetic, when we're thinking of ‘we’ and not ‘I’, we can’t help but put the other person into the equation, language just bends our minds like that. So by design,we'll be putting the other person into the equation because the sentence would feel wrong if it didn’t apply to both of us. Hence the only kind of sentences that we'd produce would be ones that the both of us like.
    • The highlights above are all the times ‘I’ actively replaced I with we while writing.

• Also, for the social media content creator inside me, there’s no ‘guys’ out there, I personally never want to look at my following as a distant audience. In that, or frankly in any context, I’d want to redefine/replace ‘guys’ with ‘friends’. Makes it much more personal, the way I’d like it.