How Do Words Shape Our Lives?

As a child, I would wrap my arms around trees and try to calculate how much I had grown. When my hands met each other around the trunk, I would convince myself I was the happiest child in the world. Nothing mattered to me; my holiday dress was covered in ants, my arms were scratched by the tree’s bark, and my skin burned slightly… Yet I still chose a small sapling and fooled myself by saying, “Look, I’ve grown.”

Sometimes, on summer days when the sun dried my breath, I would meet the gaze of a very old plane tree and share the half-finished water in my cup with it. One day, without any calculation or thought, I sought out a tree to provide me shade. A tree I leaned against, hoping it would embrace me… Without anyone noticing—beyond my holiday dress, my wounded arms, my sorrow, my joy, and my childhood—I had grown. The trees I had wrapped my arms around for years, to which I had sprinkled my last drops of water, now stretched their branches toward me, hanging their leaves like chandeliers, offering me shelter.

As I grew older, I began comparing words to trees—tightly rooted, branching into many limbs, yet never losing their inner meaning… Words that opened their arms to countless emotions and moments, and sometimes, like the trunk of a tree, caused us pain. As Mevlana said: “Just as the thirsty groan for water, water seeks a lip to quench its thirst.” Just as humans need words, words need to be spoken. Sometimes they break the luminous branches within our hearts; other times, they bring spring to our souls and make colorful flowers bloom. But if we deprive words of their roots’ moisture, their drying and eventual placement on dusty shelves becomes inevitable.

Sometimes I wonder how it would be if an entire era were turned to tears. The compassion, warmth, and tenderness carried in the tears shed from the fullness of human emotion have always enchanted me. Yet as our options multiply, our range of word usage narrows, and we are no longer allowed to fully experience any emotion. Monotony settles into our perceptions—monotonous lives and monotonous words. The power of words has become insufficient to revive us, awaken us, or make us shed a single tear.

In the emptiness of Fezana, words flutter about, entangled in spiderwebs, waiting to be rescued. But we, having surrendered ourselves to the flow of life, are defeated by even the smallest distraction. “There is a path from heart to heart.” Yet we often fail to realize that this path is built with words. Ornate words on billboards affect us, but we continue not to build, but to consume, and to chip away another piece of our selves in pursuit of our ambitions.

Yet words are not like this; they are precious, each with its own place. Sometimes hidden in a poet’s most intimate lines, sometimes at the foundation of a warm home, sometimes in a small child’s fallen candy. Sometimes they are a secret knot in a lover’s chest—unspoken, when lips fall silent, they are tied to a paper boat and entrusted to the deep oceans, carrying all their silence…

Words are paths. Elders say, “Think three times, speak once.” For neither the spoken word can be taken back, nor can the wound of a broken heart be healed. When the path ends and the unfinished sentences are given their final periods; may the deepest purple of the jacarandas bloom, may the fallen pearls find meaning on our faces, may all our limbs whisper “eşhedü”—this is my wish: a beautiful ending, and behind us, people who smile.