A tiny blog about thoughts of mine (obviously…).
SOME this – SOME that – SOME none at all : some random – some not; some provocative – some “common knowledge”, some wise – some incredibly stupid; some new – some old; some funny – some dull and moodless … (the list goes on, but I guess enough is enough, well, kind of) ...
Often, undoubtedly, a picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes – or at least a (couple of) hundred. But there are cases – not too rare – where the inverse holds as well – that a word (or a few, stringed in some right way) is/are worth a thousand pictures.
Quite often, one doesn’t have enough time, focus, and energy to express oneself clearly, succinctly, or even intelligibly at all. One doesn’t have the time and focus to edit and refine. Then WHY does one think that OTHERS are somehow supposed to have the time, focus, and energy to read and decipher those hastily written spaghetti thoughts and brain dumps? Is it fair? Can it be fair - sometimes?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a cat picture worth a thousand meows or mrreows?
What is actually most valuable is usually valued the least, because it is:
taken for granted
just assumed to exist, to be there (always, usually, normally, most of the time…)
part of the background (and our brains are good at detecting, getting used to, and virtually deleting stuff that is (in) the background, as doing so saves processing, energy, and attention – so those could be spent on other things – allegedly and supposedly on “things that matter (more than the background)”
not noticed really, overall, as a consequence of the above
Examples:
(Breathable, clean) air.
Tap water.
Friendship and friends.
Mom, dad, brothers, sisters, grandparents. Also children, sometimes – those of others, and surprisingly often one’s own, too.
…
The friendly cat at the corner of the building with its gentle meow and questioning eyes.
What is temporary tends to last a long time.
BREVITY has many ENEMIES, VERBOSITY has many INCENTIVES.
Express yourself too succinctly, and to many people your words would sound just like the whoosh of a sudden gust of wind – their ears and, more so, brains would simply NOT catch the message, and might even be slightly irritated by the way it appears to them – like most get irritated by the short high-pitched buzz of a mosquito flying by in the lazy heat of summer.
Verbosity is a bane of modern (and recent) society. Yet it exists for multiple reasons:
- inertia: yes, for sure.
- economic incentives: Authors are often paid by the amount (length) of stuff conjured up to fill all those lines, pages, and now kilobytes and (increasingly) megabytes of the prolific digital age which now cost so little to store, retrieve, deliver, and process (even over mobile radio of any still-relevant “G”(eneration) of cellular technology). (Well, costs to process are low to the MACHINES, us old-fashioned slowly-evolving humans with brains which refuse to upgrade themselves to double their processing speed and double their capacity every few years … still pay a lot to ingest and digest (or pretend to, so others won’t think badly of us) the ever-growing mountains of text and other media that pour upon us.)