Work, Play and Big Words

It's Monday and I'm posting this blog. I'm going to warn you...this blog has nothing to do with anything. I'm going to start typing and see what happens. I hope you embark on this journey with me because my soul is overflowing and I'm not sure what's going to take place. So...here we go.

I remember a time when I would read big words and feel very small. Like the word itself contained more letters in it then I had years in my life. I would surely be overtaken by its vastness. There would be no surviving against such curvatures of sound and I would be lost in the eloquence of language. Then I learned that most people do not understand the words that are bigger then the years of my life and things got easier. Fear turned into being intrigued and I started to pursue a love of words, letters and sounds.

Then such a pursuit became a chore when I entered my first real English class. It was as if though someone took a needle to my ever inflating hot air balloon of ink. Words melted off pages like butter on a hot summers day and I stopped loving them. I stopped caring about their curves and the way their sounds formed melodies of meaning. My fascination with words ceased to exist. But why?

The world had told me that my love of words was no longer something to pursue out of passion, but something to pursue out of scholarly advancement. Without a complex vocabulary, my steps in life would be altered in a way that would hold me back from 'opportunity'. But how many times do we do this to the things we once loved? Where will I end up if my love of learning such words has disappeared with the ashes labor and scrutiny? I am no longer free to fail at pronunciations and entanglements. I am judged for my passion and persecuted for my adventure. This is where I realized,
Our fascinations become our obligations.
Our passions become our duties.
Our love becomes our life.

So how do we gain back that spark of romance we once had with the ink blots that twisted into sentences and sent images into our minds? We remember why we once loved them. How must we change our perspective?
Our obligations become our fascinations.
Our duties become our passions.
Our life becomes our love.

Work and play. A saying that has captured the idealistic American life for decades has never before been so mangled in a society and I say...for the better. People strive to hold a job in something they love. And then there are times that we lose that love because it has become our job. But wouldn't the opposite be true if we truly wanted it? To love words again even though I was forced to learn them? If we change our minds, we can then change our hearts. And if we once loved words we can love words again.

I'm not sure where any of this came from or how you might apply it to your life. I just feel that someone out there needed to read this and it's probably you. I guess the moral of the story is to do everything in your power to not lose something you love because it becomes work. It's one of the hardest things to accomplish in life, but frankly we were meant to accomplish it.