Language is….wonderful! Ever since I discovered the world of metaphor, double entendre and riddle, I have been a lover of word-smithing (it’s a word) and the art of literary and linguistic manipulation. Here now are seven unique definitions of words that we all know and the impact that these unique definitions have had on my life.

1) Integrity:

When your mind, your body and your soul are fully aligned towards one purpose: when you know what you want to do, why you want to do it, you feel good doing it and you feel bad not doing it.

Most definitions of integrity that I had heard until I encountered the above basically broke integrity down into honesty vs dishonesty and the main struggle was to try and be honest and not tell a lie.

This definition of integrity? I prefer!That’s because the end result of achieving integrity is the type of life that many of us dream of but few of us ever really achieve: a life where we take control of our mind,body and soul and direct them all in one direction. A life where we feel,in the core of our gut, that that is the direction we should be headed in and can think of millions of reasons why we should be headed that way at the drop of a hat.

It means not only will you no longer lie to others and yourself. The primary job when we look at integrity in this manner is removing any contradictions or internal barriers that exist within us. With clear sight on our destination, this process, though difficult, is much easier than trying to live a lifetime ‘without lying’. After all we are simply removing obstacles and changing direction without any doubt as to where we are headed (as you can tell, knowing where we are headed is what excites me the most about this definition). Great definition that is hard to achieve but has fantastic rewards.

2) Freedom:

Freedom is when you are fully honest and fulfill all the promises you make to yourself. When you say you are going to do something you do it. When you make a promise to yourself you never have to worry about breaking it. This is the type of life where you never ever doubt yourself because you know that you take yourself and your word and your promises seriously.

Very closely linked to the definition of integrity. Most people tend to think of freedom as a life without limits. A life where no one restricts what we are, what we say or what we do. As opposed to hinging freedom on the actions of others, I like the above definition of freedom because it puts the responsibility squarely on the one thing that we have absolute control over: ourselves.

The way to achieve this definition of freedom is the same as how we would achieve integrity. Know what we are after and go about eliminating any internal (ultimately external but we must begin with internal) barriers that may stop us from fulfilling on the promises we make to ourselves.

3) Respect

Being 100% honest with another human being. Not only showing them our best side, but our most hideous, disgusting side so that they can also feel comfortable to be themselves around us and are never in fear of us.

This one has gotten me into a helluva lot of trouble and will probably be the one that people will agree with the least. In my humble opinion, should you want a relationship with someone that will last a looooonnnnnggggggg time, then from the get go be as frank as possible about your shortcomings and your failings as well as your strengths.

I began doing this in my teens out of fear of getting into a relationship with someone (male or female, old or young) and then having them abandon me later on because they realize I am not the person they thought I was (how many times have we heard of this happening). So I started the art of showing my most obnoxious and worst habits in bite size chunks whenever I would meet you.

Interestingly enough, it’s worked out pretty OK for me. Whenever people trust me, there is a genuine, deep trust and very few people have ever accused me of having hidden agendas because I am usually quite open with my agendas and my intentions, no matter how selfish, from the get go.

Of course this doesn’t mean that you should just begin talking about your criminal history or your unique romantic attraction to oak trees in the first five minutes of meeting someone but make it an objective, even at a subconscious level, to reveal your ugly side as soon as you can. As I have alluded to in the past, we all have ugly sides, and you showing yours, makes it that much easier for me to show you mine.

4) A Problem

A problem is one of two things:

a) A sign from God that something is wrong in your world that you need to fix and:

b) Your opportunity to grow beyond your current limitations

To paraphrase a quote from the great Alby Einstein: the problems of today will not be solved by the thinking of yesterday. If you have a problem and it persists it is because you can’t handle it or solve it. I know of very few problems, short of spiritual/existential ones, that some human being somewhere in the world, or in history, has not solved before. All you need to do is find people who have solved the problems that you need to solve in the past and find out how they did it. Learn how to solve this problem and as a result you will come out a better man, or woman or XXY, on the other side. And the act of disciplining yourself towardssolving a problem and/or creating something much greater than the problem ever was, typically has multiple rewards that go beyond solving the problem.

5) Love

When you look at someone that you have known a long time and all you see is a putrid, disgusting, smelly, repugnant, idiotic, son of a (insert animal here) that drives you absolutely mad when they once made you feel over the moon or safe or secure or loved. If in that moment, you choose to love them and give to them unconditionally. You are in a rare breed of people who love truly love. Truly, madly, deeply and unconditionally (Mwangi, the Displaced African, 2008)

In short, in my humble opinion, love is a choice. Infatuation (the heart palpitations, the persistent thinking about someone, the uber-high oxytocin levels, the persistent grin on your face, the feelings of safety, security and love around someone) is not love. It is the precursor to true love, it drives us together. But once that oxytocin fades, that’s when love gets its chance to shine. That’s when you get your chance to test just how much you can exercise this power of free will. You do this when your emotions are telling you that they are about as appealing as athlete’s foot during a marathon. Contradicts the definition of integrity and freedom, but hey they say love is tantamount to insanity. And what I am suggesting here is insane. Immaculately beautiful, but insane.

6)Learning

A permanent change in behavior caused by experience.

I first learned this one when sitting in Year 11/ Form 3 Psychology class. Until that point in time I had always thought that learning was the act of accumulating facts in your head that you could recite at will to either get a job done or impress your fellow man (the latter is an art that we Africans have perfected: to perspirate grandiloquent words indiscriminately and magnanimously into sentences without ejaculatory appreciation for their meaning or application).

When I learned this definition that changed all that. Learning is interacting with something in the world and coming out different on the other side. It might be that you pick up a piece of information that you never knew about before. In this case, new brain cells get added to your brain where they will stay waiting to be retrieved and used.

It might also be that you form new connections between old pieces of data, such as phone lines + computers = Internet. It might also be that as a result of performing a specific activity, your body acclimatizes to the movement to the point that the activity can be performed at the drop of a hat.

In short the best way to learn is by actually interacting and doing something with what you learn. Rather than sitting in the middle of a library trying to cram facts, actually take a moment to understand how that knowledge gets applied in the real world, go interact with people who use the data on a daily basis and make the information a part of you.

Another way this changed the way I do things is that any time I had to learn something, I immediately tried to connect any new information with information that already exists within my head. This is what makes tools such as mnemonics so powerful. So, if you have something you need to learn, like say how to find the circumference of a circle, perhaps try to measure the radius and diameter of your wheel and find it’s area rather than sticking strictly to abstract drawings on two dimensional pages.

7) Decision

This one just got me to the core of my soul:

A decision is when you set your sights on something and cut yourself off from any other possibility other than what you have set your sights on.

This means that we can no longer “try” to do things. We either do things or we don’t. We either commit to doing something and doing it to the best of our abilities and powers or we don’t. We don’t “try” (which is usually our way of saying, we won’t give our all, we’ll give a half hearted attempt because we are scared of fully committing to something, failing and making a fool of ourselves).

We set our sights on that which we love, become people of integrity and freedom who know we have nothing to fear whenever we reveal our ugly sides to others and we use any problems we encounter as opportunities to grow and thrive beyond the problem.

I hope this article wasn’t too abstract. It felt a helluva-lot-of-good to write this article and I hope it feels a helluva-lot-better-to-read-it and you get things that you can apply to your life.

Be blessed and bless others,

Mwangi

Hi,

Just came back from taking some time off blogging. I really really missed this blog and am glad to be back.

A Lot Has Happened: Quick Recap

Over the weekend, for those who don’t know, there was a peace agreement signed in Kenya. Apparently there was dancing and celebration all throughout Kenya and I send nothing but love down there. This is a bright light, that is hopefully THE END of a very dark period.

For much more insightful commentary on the situation please visit Global Voices Online and What an African Woman Thinks.

Secondly, my readership had a dramatic increase yet again over the weekend. To all who promoted my blog, a huge word of thanks.To all my new readers, feel free to visit the Welcome desk and enjoy your stay.

Finally, my last post on the different perceptions of promiscuity amongst the sexes kicked up quite a little storm. To be honest, I didn’t think the post would have the effect it has. I guess the only thing I would implore everyone to do would be to examine what their feelings are around the topic and WHY they feel the way they do. Because clearly this is a sensitive point for a lot of us and I would actually be curious as to why. So, if you have something to say about the promiscuous lifestyle in men and women please check out my last post and join the discussion.

The Power of Language:Part two

Just a couple of hours after I wrote the article on the power of language, I felt a bit of a ’stirring’ in my soul. I realized I had a little bit more to say about the subject and so allow me to add a little bit to the discussion.

Creating a ‘New Africa’

Right now, among Kenyan circles especially, there is a lot of talk about crafting a vision for the country. About redesigning our country from the ground up. I know this discussion is probably taking place in Chad, maybe even in Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea amongst others. I think in crafting this vision, we would be short-changed if we didn’t at least discuss language.

Colonization of Language

When the barbarians of the old colonial system decided it was time to take over Africa, a lot of them did it under the premise that they were ‘civilizing the savages’.

Civilizing: Can also be described as edifying, enlightening, humanizing, refining.

Savages: Lacking polish or manners or Vicious or merciless

Never mind the fact that they went about “civilizing” us in a savage way, but one of the things that all colonies insisted on was teaching us their language. It’s one of those things, that to be honest, I missed for a very long time. All colonial powers insisted on teaching us their language. Why?

Communicate for the Sake of Trade

Of course the initial reason is probably so that it would be easier for the powers to strip Africa of her resources and trade and exploit. No point trading day in and day out with someone who speaks Kiswahili when you can easily just teach him English. However I think it was a little more than that. They also did it so that:

1) We could see the world the way they see it: When you fully understand the language of a culture, you understand a lot about the culture. A lot of the metaphors in African language involve animals (Fahari wawili wakipigana, nyasi ndio itaumia – I know I said that wrong, my bad, but it basically means “When two cows fight, the grass gets hurt!”) and plants and the Earth because African societies and economies were based around agriculture. By comparison, watch your typical American movie and you realize that a lot of the language is the language of war (”Knock ‘em dead”, “You’re killing me”, “It’s like they’ve got a gun to my head”, “You’re the bomb!”). Never forget, the States has been at war with one nation after the other for almost every decade of it’s existence, not to mention the gun culture amongst other things that have probably combined to keep war and war ideas and metaphors perennially embedded in the American psyche.

When recreating our society, we must rewrite the text books and the language and grammar books to include the type of language, metaphor and proverb of the society that we want to create. If we want an egalitarian society, then let’s not make it difficult for ourselves by including metaphors such as ” Nobody remembers who won silver” in our national discussion, dialogue, debate and education.

Instead we can include metaphors such as, “All boats rising together.” “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” “How can there be peace, Unless we all can eat?” etc etc. Again, to a lot of people this may sound like me being pedantic, however, never forget without a language we have no way of describing anything or putting words to what we want to create. Let’s describe the type of tomorrow we want to see and use this language to create a magnificent future.

Negative vs Positive Language

In addition to that I thought I would share with people some ways to use language to bring the positive out of a situation. This is something that I am pretty competent at and so I thought I would expand a bit on what I had spoken about in the first part of the article.

I Don’t Do This Anymore vs This is What I Will Do Instead

I don’t drink/smoke/take drugs: Whereas these are fine, anyone whose into goal setting will tell you that you never describe anything in the negative. Or at least only in the negative. This is because if we only have a negative state ( i.e. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t overeat) that leaves a vacuum. Instead we should always speak in terms of the positive future or the positive state we want to create to fill this vacuum. In so doing, we create a compelling future that we feel inspired to move towards.

After all that drinking, smoking, taking drugs was doing something positive for you. It was fulfilling some need or desire that you once had. Instead of saying I don’t drink, a more empowering way to describe the situation might be:

I am now free from the shackles of alcoholism and can now find a more empowering way to fulfill my need for excitement in my life.

or

I am now lucid and in control of my life.

Opportunity and Learning Experience

Again let me reemphasize how important it is to re-frame any problem or challenge that may face you as an opportunity or a learning experience. I will give you a simple example of something that happened to me and show you all the lessons that I learned from it:

A couple of months back, I moved to a new city. Now, the vacancy rate in the city was at about 2%. In addition to that, the tertiary institution that trained me was a hoax and so as I headed up into the city I basically had no qualifications of any sort and the housing situation was beyond terrible for any new tenants.

I have no idea how long I was there but for the entire time I was there I was homeless. In addition to that, for the first month or so, I had absolutely no source of income, and my savings were dwindling every day. From that experience I learned:

a) How to get a job when you have no qualifications or paperwork or address whatsoever (Go to a backpacker’s hostel and apply for the construction, landscaping and/or sales positions. They expect you to have problems with paperwork and so a lot of these places pay you in cash and some of them even pay you on a day to day basis so you can stay afloat)

b) How to get a job in your industry if you have no paperwork (Referees! Referees! Referees! Get people in your industry to be your referrals. In addition to that you could offer to work for your prospective employer for free to show them what you can do and ask them to only hire you if you seem like you can do the job)

c) How to ‘live’ in a city when you are homeless (Work for the first week flat out. Go on ebay or trading post or notice boards or anywhere where you can find cheap cars. Go buy a cheap car but make sure it has heating and air conditioning. Go to your local beddings store and get a blanket. If you need a daily shower, go to the local swimming/recreation centre or to the beach and use their public showers. Spend your free days in malls because of the food, toilet and make sure the mall has a Borders so you can read books for free) etc etc etc

In short, there are very few situations or challenges or obstacles that cannot be the seed of something greater. If one man’s crucifiction was described as ’salvation and hope’ for billions, then surely you can find the good in your not being able to ‘find a good man(or woman)’. Maybe you’re not good enough and it’s your opportunity to become a better person.

Anyway, just a couple of thoughts. If you have something you want to say, you’ve heard it before, leave a comment or get in touch with me.

B blessd and bless othaz,

Mwangi

A couple of word smiths for you:

If you understand just what Lupe is saying in ‘Dumb it Down’, you are ‘the one’!

Lupe Fiasco – Dumb it Down