To be (responsible) is to exist
Essay by Lucian-Dragos Bogdan
One day I opened my mailbox and found a message from my danish friend, Mads. He asked me to help him in an ambitious project.
He intended to create a dictionary of only 100 words. "If you would have to choose a single word for a 100 word dictionary, which one would it be?"
As much as I appreciate and respect Mads, in the beginning I thought of his request as being silly. "How can you reduce hundred of thousands of years of human evolution based on communication to only ONE WORD?" No doubt that the development of language helped our race to grow and get stronger over the millennia. Should we deny that by throwing away what we think is unnecessary? Wouldn't this be a sacrilege?
Than it occurred to me. Even I have written some years ago a story in which I assumed a mute was blessed for not having him wasted through meaningless gibberish. I focused on that and I realized that in our days words are meaningless for real. We spit them out as they come into our mouth, flowing out in their multitude as rivers dig their way throughout a plane. Instead of a single word, heavy of wisdom and meanings, we use hundreds that could barely match it even if we take them all together.
Once I had those thoughts, my friend's idea didn't seem so foolish at all. And then I started searching for it. Which would be the essence, the root of all we had/have/will have?
I didn't have to think very much. The idea leading me to accepting Mads' project was the clue. Responsibility was necessary in order to censure the words going out our mouth. The words would have been responsibly chosen for once they were spit out they couldn't come back. I once heard a saying: "It only takes one word to open a deep wound into the one you love and than millions of words won't be able to heal that wound."
So I had a proper word for the dictionary: responsibility.
Yet it is a much too vague word. It is not a basic word but one that appears somewhere later, on the trunk. It isn't the root.
What do I mean by "root", "basic word"? It would be best to give an example of what I think this word means, saying that "(to) be" is such a word. Should then I say "to be responsible"?
There were just too many words now to say a simple thing. My entire philosophy would have been break down if I would use an expression instead of a single word.
Digging deeper to search the root, I realized that the responsibility isn't reduced to only words. It is about our entire lives, our entire behavior. We should assume responsibility for every gesture we make, for every second flying away, for every thought we think. We should live our very present, mindless about past or future. We should assume every bit of life. It is not my genes, not my habitat, not my job, not the mass-media, not the entertainment industry guilty for how I decide to live. It is only me. They can help me go in one direction or another but in the end it is my decision to do it this way or the other.
We should responsibly live every second, not letting life pass by. "I don't know what to do with my time" should disappear from our vocabulary. "I need to lay down somewhere and let everything pass by" is also something to be forgotten. When we sleep we should SLEEP, when we wash ourselves we should WASH ourselves, when we eat we should EAT, when we work we should WORK, etc. We should stop mixing things into our minds while we are doing something and focus on the things we are doing. It's the only way to be responsible for every action. In a word, we should BE. Here and now.
"That's the word I was looking for!" I shouted and sent it via e-mail to Mads. Unfortunately, it has already been chosen by another friend of mine, Ovidiu. What else should it be then? Mads suggested me that being such a basic word it could be polished ("to be or not to be", "being", etc.) and I was tempted to return to the late "to be responsible".
Yet I had a revelation that I could find something with the same meaning.
In fact, "to be responsible" the way I put it here means "to exist".
Lucian-Dragos Bogdan,
lucianbogdan@yahoo.com