The way of words

“I’m all worded out. I have no words to express myself with.” In routine life, this is not much of a problem. There are ways to sidestep the lack of words. But in academic life, you have to have a well stocked arsenal of precisely the right words, and that too, on instant recall. If you’re asked a question in class and you don’t have the right words, you don’t have the right answer.

This also applies to answering examination questions, whether on paper or during the viva (oral examination). There’s a marking key, and if your answer doesn’t coincide with it, boom, you’re done for. During the viva, the examiner keeps fishing for the right word and will keep stringing one question after another in a long chain in the quest to get you to arrive at the precise word.

Thankfully, in non-academic situations, there is less pressure to find the right word. In fact, if you’re with the right person, you don’t need words at all. You can do something together, or sit side by side, each person doing their own thing, and it still works out beautifully. In conversations with my mother, I often find myself or her using vague indicators instead of proper names. Get that from there. Stuff like that works if you know the other person well enough.

There is one occasion, however, when I have 100% of the right words, in exactly the right sequence. That is during Salah (prayer). One time the question came to my mind that why does Allah want us to recite a predetermined string of words to him five times a day. Then I concluded that if we had to come up with the perfect prayer to officially present to Allah, we would be at a loss. We don’t have to search for the words to please Allah; He has already told us what He wants to hear. The whole point, then, is whether or not we actually mean all the declarations we make in prayer. It means that even with all the right words, we can still miss the mark.

Now that I’ve mentioned prayer, it’s only a matter of course that I also mention the importance of words in dua. It’s interesting that even though Allah knows all of our inner nameless and wordless feelings and yearnings, making the effort to spell them out and present them as a request to Him is an act which He loves. When I’m making dua, I imagine the words being written down in my book of deeds. On so-and-so date, in the year such-and-such, Iqra asked for this, this and this. There it goes, written down, a plea straight to heaven, and not a single word of it is wasted. Therein lies the whole appeal of worship to me. You utter a single letter of worship and it is stamped and sealed on your record and will come in good use to you one day. I always compare this to the matter of exams, where you know one topic well but get asked questions from some other topic, or even after studying something for hours, you forget a point, so that the time and energy spent on the material doesn’t exactly equal the marks you get in the end.

Going wordless for awhile, disconnecting yourself from books, the Internet, conversation etc, and just drinking in the silence (preferably with a good cup of tea) is just what you need sometimes. As Rudyard Kipling said, “Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.” You need some space, otherwise you’ll start to see the side effects!