Defined

I suppose we all find ways and words to define ourselves.  Perhaps even images, if you look at Facebook and the hunt for the suitable profile photo. I wonder if we all would hunt for something as perfectly fitting to place after our bold name on the thin threaded pages of a Webster’s dictionary.  A word or two, a phrase or short, clipped sentence, found next to our name, maybe with a simple sketched ink drawing. If so, my definition would be simple.  I am a runner. Yes, a simple definition.

Life lends us lessons, like a vocabulary list in the depths of English class.  When you hope you will just be studying the conflicts of Huckleberry Finn, but have to cram twenty words into your mind for Wednesday’s quiz.  Just when I thought I had grasped my root word, I need to find the other definitions, the other phrases that fall into numbers two, three, four…the definitions I suppose I overlooked.

For a few short months ahead, I won’t be running.  The bold type that holds my name is there…and in the days after I heard the news, I am not sure how the blank space would be filled. So I did what anyone would do, I shut the dictionary.  And turned on the internet instead.

There I was tossed from one field to another, almost hurled into words that matter and words that don’t.  No way to determine a part of speech from an antonym.  There was nothing like the guide words we find at the top of the page that let us know we found the right spot.  After three hours of plummeting through cyberspace, I shut the computer, walked away, and let my head fall in my hands.

It was then that my daughter taught me to look at the other terms…the ones that fell between the creases of the book.  The prefixes, the suffixes, the synonyms that have come before, after, and exist now.  Words that define me in ways I had forgotten because I had been caught in a one-word answer.  As she drove the car, and I wept quietly, she rattled off who I was, my own vocabulary list.  A mother, a friend, a wife, a daughter, a swimmer, a cook, a counselor, a writer…and a few words perhaps still to define.

We are more likely to spend time on a snapping a photo for Facebook since Webster isn’t taking proper noun entries.  But for now, it may be worth it for all of us to spend a moment to define ourselves  To see yourself as all of who you are…every syllable, parts of speech and even the grammatical errors.  And we need to leave some space, so we can add to the list…more adjectives, nouns, and verbs we discover.  In this wonderful way, we stand defined…and Webster words can mix it up!