Word Play

A friend of mine pinged me today to say 'hi'. In a playful Sunday mood, I replied 'fi'. My friend then responded with a 'wi-fi'. I replied 'wi-max' and the chain started. We went on and on from 'cli-max','cli-mate', 'room-mate' and finally after more than a dozen transitions reached 'certainty', where we finally decided to call it quits. What we were doing was keeping a set of syllables in the word constant and changing the remaining part to construct a new word. It was interesting how we could come up with words that would fit and that too by merely thinking.

At the end of this exercise, I realized what wonderful gifts we, humans, have been gifted by Nature. We rarely realize the importance of the blessing called articulation. What if primitive man never learnt how to speak? There would be no means to communicate our thoughts and ideas. We would never have been able to express our love, joy, anger and sorrow in words. We can't even be too sure whether we would have existed in our current form.

The other thing that we often forget to give importance to is our power to think. 'Think' sounds a very abstract word, but, it encompasses much of our entire existance. Our thoughts drive us, frame us, define us. We think about our past and call it memory. We think about our future and call it a dream. We think about our present and call it analysis that drives our actions. I believe in destiny and that there is already a plan in place for everybody. This sometimes makes me feel that all our 'thinking' is of no use. We think for hours and hours and then what happens was destiny. But, at another level, I feel that all this thinking is our little contribution in the Big Plan. We want to put in our bit, so that when we get something, we can justify our deserving it. So much so for Human Folly.

This reminds me of the two contentious phrases:

"I think, therefore, I am" and "I am, therefore, I think".