Words Within

I had the good fortune a couple of months ago to travel to Italy for the first time.

While I could tell you about the wonders of the places I visited, I am related to people who can and have written of these regions with more skill and evocative prose than I ever could.

But, I did make an interesting discovery, or should I say rediscovery.

Ten years ago, when I was last in Europe, I was in Denmark for around a week. While I discovered, for one of the few times in my life, that I was surrounded (or immersed, as language programs like to term it) by a language other than English.

As a result, just as when I am similarly immersed in quality music, I tended to focus on my mind and its language. Instead of thinking, in “automatic pilot” fashion, in English, my mind became untethered, looking, looking to "come out to play", searching creatively for any other language it knew, in my case, German.

I spoke in German to my relatives from time to time, rather than take advantage of their excellent English.

(By the way, people have often told me that they expected my German would help me learn Danish. Believe me, it was no advantage. German tends to be much far forward in pronunciation, Danish is swallowed. In fact, if anything, Danish shares more sounds with Old English, ie, Anglo-Saxon.)

Well, at any rate, in Italy, the same thing happened. While people spoke English to us without difficulty or objection, when they could, the immersion of all surrounding textual sounds forced me inward to pay attention, and suddenly, slow down and stop the sort of “tape loop” and automatic feeding of often mindless English through my consciousness.

Why does this happen?

Well, I am neither linguist, nor neurologist, but I do meditate, and, my guess is that the mind’s sudden realization of an alien textual context gave the mind something it’s supposed to have, a task worthy of reason and paying appropriate attention.

Once that happened, that unanchored mind, instead of meandering, undifferentiated, unthinking, and unconscious, among others conversations and my own, was forced back, by a wall of ignorance, into itself.

By the way, when I finally got to engage someone in German, a charming college student from Hamburg, she was very kind, particularly as my initial attempts to get back to that second language were fumbling, indeed. But, I got better quickly, and I was proud of myself for taking that chance.

So, be bold, learn another language. If you take up that challenge with the right attitude, you’ll be on stage, an actor in the theater of speech, and you’ll appreciate your mother tongue all the more.

Stay tuned.