At a very tender age, the time when the mind is still negotiating with the idea of words as sounds falling freely in the air at random, they introduce a sudden presence of meaning allotted to these random sounds. In comes the wise old stout odd Dictionary with its imposing presence that would last a lifetime. Certainty is ascribed to uncertainties of the unknown. Fixed meanings begin to form and chambers of rigid associations between sound and concept are framed in the mind, forever. Sound gradually graduates into language, so far so that the existence of a determined meaning to a free falling sound becomes the very criteria of recognizing it as a word. And only words placed together in an accepted structure of codes begin to constitute the notion of language. You begin to verbalize. Verbalize everything, each moment of being into the known paradigm of recognized meaning. This illusion of meaning lasts till you encounter the vast domains of the meaningless. And when you do, you encounter the fragility of this chimera called the Dictionary which promised you the certainty of meanings at a very tender age. For, meaning constitutes knowledge. Meaning spells boundaries. Meaning ensures social acceptability of your existence. You know meanings, till you recognize the essentially thin line of difference between knowledge and understanding. As you do, you realize that understanding is the real counterpart of your non-stop breathing exercise called being, while knowledge, as a component of inherent nasty narcissism had just been faking it all this while through illusory but reassuring meanings. Say for instance, the word 'fatigue'. The good old D will tell you it is a feeling of extreme tiredness, sometimes caused by physical and mental exertion, till you live to understand that it is perhaps the quietened flow of the river as silt settles in the course of its flow. You realize the daftness of subjective realities based upon meanings when the wise old D tells you that 'feeling' means 'an emotion', while 'emotion' means a 'feeling'. You understand the joke you have lived by when 'life' is said to mean simply 'the period between birth and death' or ' the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment' - all neatly summed up in a line or two, while You (poor thing!), are still figuring it out like a perfectly useless mark of interrogation, day in, day out.
