A Few Words About Words

I was sitting in my living room yesterday reading a book, and it got me thinking about how interesting the written word is.  I mean, if you think about it, the invention of writing itself is a friggin' miracle.  Somewhere between crawling out of the primordial ooze and present day, we as a collective species managed to figure out a written language, which then evolved into hundreds of written languages, simply because we thought that there were important things out there that needed to be said, and recorded, and remembered.  We went from hieroglyphs to rudimentary written word to full fledged language all in the short time that man has walked this Earth.  Now we're here reading things that were written hundreds of years ago, and forming religions based on books written centuries ago.  So much of our culture is based on what people have written down ages before we were born.  Countries are founded on written documents, laws are still made based on those documents, and there are those who have been lucky enough to have their literature endure the test of time.  When you stop and think about it, it's pretty mind blowing.

When I was reading my book yesterday I sat there wondering how many other people have read this book, and how many people loved it, or hated it?  How many people in this world have picked up the same volume I'm currently reading and said "Hey, this has changed my life"?  I think that's one of the things that's so great about any sort of writing, that it lasts and that it can trigger the same emotion in one person as it does in someone else millions of miles away and that now these two people who may never meet still have some sort of unspoken connection to one another.  I like to imagine that other people are like me and that they read about a place in a book and realize that they want to go to that place and experience it for themselves to see if it lives up to everything they've read in books.  Sometimes, when I'm walking through a new city that I read about in a book, I wonder if someone else is in that city for the exact same reason, walking the same street and that in some strange way we are sharing the same moment without even realizing it.  That's what makes it so awesome, that all over the world, people can have the same experience without having to be together. 

Anyway, it was just something I was thinking about.