Diction

I took a two-year hiatus from music.  I drove in silence.  I never had it playing at home.  I had an mp3 player that lay dormant somewhere in my apartment.  I am sure I heard it when I went out-n-about, I may have even put some dollars in a juke box from time to time, but I have no recollection of hearing it play or being particularly moved by anything for that time period.  What I find interesting about this fact is not that I went without; I am certain there are many people who just don’t get into it, and I surely was not a die-hard fan of an musician in particular.  I find it interesting that it was that two year window of my life when I felt the lowest.  

I think about that time today not because I want to write some inspirational piece about how music saved my life; though, I can tell you that one of the first signs of me moving out of that darkness was when I started listening to it again.  Rather, I was thinking about that time because yesterday, as I cleaned and did some yard work, I put on my ipod and lost myself in the world of music for the first time in a little while.  It was lovely, uplifting, and distracting from some of the things about which I tend to brood.  After some thought, I realized that music and the recent blogging process have been two fantastic sources of release for me.

Confession:  I have another blog.  It’s private, a place for me to maintain my discipleship notes and narrate the inner-workings of my mind.  Writing for an audience is foreign to me, and I often doubt that my opinion about things is all that exciting or ground-breaking, so why write at all?  I wish I could be as delightfully witty and sassy as one of my friends in her writing - you know who you are - or as vulnerable as another of my friends.  I suppose the purpose of all this is in the title of the blog itself: to discover my voice, a process I hope never ends.

Attempting to define my purpose as a writer/blogger makes me contemplate the purpose for all of my words - have I mentioned the whole brooding thing? - regardless of the context. I weigh my words much more carefully if I am going to be writing them, in an email, on paper, online, texting, wherever.  And I am often shocked when I see nastiness in the same venues.  There is something about the written word that seems permanent, and thusly, more sacred to me.  Paradoxically, I am rarely offended by swearing or most words, for that matter, if they are spoken, and I am decidedly less careful with the words that run through my head and sometimes spill out of my mouth.  Perhaps I chalk them up to heat-of-the-moment ramblings.  What I have been finding, though, is those points of passion, those sometimes frustration-filled thoughts turn into spoken words that I doubt I would ever put to paper.  

The majority of the music I enjoy focuses on praise and worship, and I love songs with which I can harmonize (though my neighbors probably don’t particularly like it when they come on whilst I am belting out lyrics as I am weeding the flower beds).  One would imagine that the more of those aforementioned heat-of-the-moment ramblings I have, the more I would plug in to the music.  Ironically, it is the converse that is true for me, and I haven’t been listening to much music of late.  I’ve thought about writing about those negative things nipping at the corners of my mind, but what would it profit?  Yes, I might feel better to get it out of my head, but who else would benefit from such an endeavor?

I expect lyricists weigh their diction carefully; after all, they have a message they want to convey clearly.  Each word ached over for its denotation, connotation, sound.  It frustrates me that I am not as conscientious about the words I use to give voice to my thoughts; it disheartens me that I allow them to simmer over into the words I speak; and, it saddens me to know that sometimes those words infuse toxin into someone else’s day.   

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes: Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. (4:29) I want so badly for my words to be grace-filled and harmonious, not merely in my inner-monologue but for those that trickle, stream, and gush into the world around me.  I want to remember that each word is its own note, part of a greater composition that has the power to disparage or edify, abash or minister, curse or bless, and I want to choose them with care, mindful of my purpose.