I had this thought in mind during a conversation I shared with a friend this past week that I’ve waited until now to commit to words. Having the internet obviously helps, but I think letting it grow a bit in my mind has helped. I don’t know if it’s really original or whether or not it changes anyone’s views on love, but I certainly hope it provides some food for thought.
I kept thinking about the nature of language and just how difficult it is to pick certain ones up. There’s this impasse and frustration attached to foreign languages, especially those with different writing and phonetic systems. But I feel like identities are sort of language, too – rich in complexities, nuances, and exceptions. The language of our thoughts and actions are a special voice that defines who we are.
And whether or not this parallels the idea of a soulmate, I find myself asking about all the important people I value in my life. This select group of people in my life are sacred for their dedication and ability to develop a fluency in who I am just as I might develop that for them. Perhaps love is a heightened form of this: a fluency to such a vast degree. What more can we want as human beings but to have someone fluent in the very essence that is us? To have some speak our language and resonate with our frequencies?
But at the same time, consistent practice for the fluency in one language may inadvertently (or possibly intentionally) disrupt the fluency of other languages. Have you not felt that you have centered your life around someone and tried to become as fluent as possible in them only to lose them in the end? Notice how friends, family, and other potential love interests seem at that moment more distant. If you don’t use it, you lose it. You lose the words, the connections you had with people just as a result of a lack of practice. You can even lose fluency in yourself, especially if you’ve constructed your life around others. This is what often intensifies the void when it comes to define you more than yourself.
This process of learning “soul-speech” can be as easy or as painstaking as the individual might make it out to be. I feel like the greater issue is the commitment to learning the language of another person, even if it may result in partial fluency in broken words and bits lost in translation. Love is the effort, the time spent, and the heart involved. I think we ultimately find ourselves synthesizing into our own languages of self what we have borrowed or gleaned from the languages of others, and it is interesting how our respective connections make us such melanges of these different human pieces.
I find it so beautiful to think that language is so fluid; everyone we happen to come into contact with may change the very language of the self.
Carl Jung, in this light, is incredibly right:
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
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