Meaning The Same Words

~ 1:30 Minute Read.

Last sum­mer I had an in­ter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with a friend who was in a more spir­i­tu­al phase at that point in time.

He was fol­low­ing these peo­ple who based a lot of their wis­dom on the fact that “ev­ery­thing and ev­ery­body is made of light”. What a ridicu­lous idea, you may think! And so do I, at least in the lit­er­al mean­ing.

While he was try­ing to ex­plain con­se­quences of ev­ery­thing be­ing made of light, my brain was not re­al­ly able to take in the ideas he was propos­ing, since I knew it to not be true. The key, though, was that these peo­ple had ex­pand­ed the word “light” to mean more than it does in our usu­al use, i.e. “phys­i­cal light”.

Hon­est­ly, I don’t think it is a good to start us­ing a word that is al­ready tak­en for things it is not com­mon­ly un­der­stood to mean. As­sume I’d ex­pand “ap­ple” to al­so mean “ba­nana” and I send you shop­ping for “ap­ples”, but you bring no ba­nanas. I ob­vi­ous­ly shot my­self in the foot there, ba­nanas are de­li­cious.

We set­tled by giv­ing his “light” a new word that doesn’t col­lide with “phys­i­cal light” as much, which al­lowed me to be open to his ideas.

Writ­ten in 10 min­utes, ed­it­ed in 2 min­utes.