I once had the most unusual experience.
Someone had just said to me the words “Thank you”. Just these two words, nothing else.
Now ordinarily, I would never consider an occurrence like this to be anything too unusual. However what made this day and this specific event unusual was that I didn’t just hear the words, I felt them.
In that moment it felt like the two of us were the only two people in this world, and the only feeling I could feel inside me was this person’s gratitude towards me. There was no way I could look away and no way I could feel anything except that feeling of gratitude. At that moment, it felt like time had frozen still, and that this moment would last forever.
Now this didn’t makes any sense at all. Words weren’t supposed to work like this. Words were just sounds we made with our mouths because our parents and teachers had taught us to make certain specific sounds at specific times or during specific occasions.
Words weren’t supposed to have this kind of feeling attached to them, and the feelings definitely weren’t supposed to come inside of you in such an overwhelming way when you heard them.
All my life I’d heard people speak using words that they didn’t really mean, asking me how I was doing when they didn’t really care, apologising when they weren’t really sorry.
But that day, I realised something very, very important, that words weren’t just what I had always believed they were. There could be more to words than just the sounds that most people uttered, and it was possible to communicate with the intention of conveying a genuine feeling behind those words.
In fact, words by themselves don’t matter at all. It is the feeling behind the words that really matters.
It is this feeling that give words their meaning, and if you don’t feel anything when saying the words then the words are just meaningless.
That day I realised that I too wanted to learn to communicate like this, to use words with feeling so others could feel them in my words.
Since that day, I found it harder and harder to connect with people who used words without feeling, but whenever I met people whose words I could feel, I found that we connected in a way that we didn’t even need to use words. I started both cherishing and craving these special connections.
And now, I just hope to get better and better at expressing my feelings, so that one day I can learn to convey everything that I feel, with or without words.