Imagine a stream of words without any punctuation.
Something sort of like this:
A boy came into the room with his eyes lit up smiling like the sun rose and set on his face I wondered who he was and where he had been what right he had to be so audaciously happy when I was so so stuck on sad his joy bothered me unsettled me I wanted to ignore him but somehow I couldn’t look away
Difficult to read? Certainly. A few commas, semi-colons, question marks, and full stops would probably have helped.
Now, consider a whole passage made up of nothing but punctuations:
?!:;??..!-;??!&&”—::;;?!.,:;;’-“?!...:;
&;)(!!::...:-&!?!/-/:;!!.!?,-&!!..,-),’/-:.
What about that? Can you make any sense of the marks and symbols? Of course not, because punctuation marks are incomprehensible unless they are attached to words and sentences.
So what is my point? A couple of years ago, I attended a celebration of life service held in honour of a beautiful, dynamic, multi-talented woman who passed away quite suddenly at the age of 37, leaving her family and friends in deep grief. As I sat in the service, I was incredibly moved by the palpable sadness in the air. Yet at the same time, I was inspired by the purpose-driven life this amazing lady lived and how she was able to impact so many souls in her very short time here on earth.
In that moment, I found myself thinking about how life moves in ebbs and flows. Ups and downs. Hills and valleys. We welcome and embrace the flows and the ups and the hills, but we resist and resent the ebbs, the downs, the valleys. We expect, demand even, a life filled with happiness uninterrupted. We want good times unpunctuated by the rudeness of pain and loss and grief.
As I thought about all this, it occurred to me that the good times are like undulating words and sentences; and bad times are like punctuations, forcing us to pause, slow down and consider what we are taking in; requiring us to reflect on what the words are trying to tell us. The punctuations bring meaning to the words and help us to comprehend the unfolding story.
I’ve come back to this thought many times in the last few months, with so many senseless deaths and tragedies happening close to home and farther afield. But the past couple of days since the news of Ibidun’s passing, have brought the reality into sharper, more acute focus for me.
Life can indeed seem meaningless and futile at times like this. It can be difficult to make sense of it all. But I can’t get away from the truth that life is only comprehensible when you take the words and the punctuations together. The words form the sentences that tell the story, and the punctuations add nuance and prompt that bring true meaning and perspective to the human experience.
Our job as students of life, “readers” if you will, is to see the punctuations for what they really are:
- An opportunity to pause and reflect on what the Writer is trying to tell us,
- And occasionally, a prompt to move on to the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next chapter.
The plot is yet unfolding; it will all make sense in the end... if you’re reading the right Book, that is. But that’s a story for another day.
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