The words contained here are nothing. They are merely a static representation of the way the writer interfaced with the world at a given point in time and attempted to relate that back to the reader. The words on the page are a crystallized take on reality at one specific moment in time, but not the end. That’s the beauty of dialogue. You work and re-work the words until you have said what you needed to say and it has been heard the way you mean it to be heard. You get as many chances as you need.

Choose your words carefully. If you don’t, you run the risk of saying something you don’t mean. There are plenty of pithy sayings we employ that don’t actually convey the truth. But when uttered or typed upon a page, something is communicated. People assume what you mean because they have heard a similar collection of words before, but it may not be what you mean at all. That’s why it is helpful to knead the words back and forth until you have arrived at what you really want to say.

If I went back and re-worked everything I have written, I might be tempted to make changes, if ever so slight ones. I have changed since I wrote the original versions, and the way I interact with the world is different now. I might use different words arranged in a different order, possibly in a different “voice.”

If these words were all lost, the thoughts and meaning would not be. Whether or not they could not be reproduced verbatim, the words are out there in the world. Once a word is spoken or scribbled on a page, it does not just exist in sound or ink, but in the atmosphere. It has become a real part of the air in the room in which you spoke or wrote it, and it has changed the environment somehow. There are many words and phrases that have been whispered in quiet that will never be uttered quite the same way again, but all is not lost. The words live – inside you and outside you in some elastic form – malleable enough to be reworked later, as needed. The words were always only an incomplete representation of who you were anyway.

You are relating to everything all the time, and doing so with grace or not. Your life’s work may exist on a page, a screen or a canvas. It is a finished piece of posterity – an old and dusty artifact for others to unearth when you are gone – but the real work of your life is how you interact with everything around you. After a few hundred years, no one will remember your name. They may find your work (your art, your writing), but your real impact is how you changed the matter around you and how you allowed it to change you. That is relationship. You have infinite opportunities to change the world.