Your Heart as a Weapon

I’ve always wished I could sing. I love singing, but I have a horrible voice.

Now as I watch video after video of Coldplay’s Chris Martin and I see how the people react to his singing, how much change he and his band and their writers and their composers have managed to make, I only have one word in mind that’s repeating over and over again: I have a voice.

I deal with Deaf people on a daily basis, and you know what? They have a voice too.

I don’t have to sing. I don’t even have to speak. There are hundreds of ways for self-expression. One of them is writing. One of them is an act of kindness. One of them is painting. One of them is knitting.

Anything that I do is a form of self-expression. The way I arrange items on my desk is self-expression. What I choose to read and what I choose to ignore is a form of self-expression. The sort of songs I listen to, the sort of people I deal with, the sort of things I invest my time in, the sort of items I choose to wear … I self-express as I breathe.

And I do have a voice. I have hands that can type. I was blessed with ears that can hear and a tongue that can speak. And I have a voice.

As I sit here writing, I try to figure out what I want to use that voice for. Maybe I’ll change the world someday. For now, I think I’m getting ready. And as I spend minute after minute absorbing, learning, I make as much change on a small scale as I can.

One thing I do that I count as my life mission is, I try to make people see the goodness in themselves.

I don’t care about the goodness in the world or the goodness in their lives. More often than not, we’re thankful and grateful for things that are external, for things that exist outside our limited body and our infinite soul. But what we aren’t grateful even nearly enough for is what exists within. That’s where I’d like to believe I come in.

I do what was once done for me.

I turn people’s eyes within. I tell them exactly how I see them, and I make sure I say it enough times to start helping undo the harm that’s befallen us all. I wish I could bring back the child inside us that once was, but the best I can do is show people, as I myself was shown, that they have so much potential within them other people should start feeling envious.

I know I can’t. I know I will fail more often than not. But as I wait for the moment I’m ready to create a bigger ripple of change, I occasionally touch the lazy pond with my fingertips and watch the swirls as they go. What can one swirl do against an ocean? Not much. But in the world of physics, even that one single swirl is calculatable.

And in a world of magic where physics holds less importance and imagination matters more, one swirl just might be enough.

July 16th, 2019