In a World Full of Nouns, Be a Verb!

In a World Full of Nouns, Be a Verb!

Stuff. Things. Material goodies. Turn on the TV, look at any website and it seems every ad is selling, pushing, and promising happiness by stuff. “If only you had this shiny new blah-ba-de-blah, you would find perfect happiness and bliss.” My friends, I am over all of it. I am over stuff. I am over things. In a word, I am over nouns. My desire to end accumulating nouns is something our buy it, use it, throw it away, and buy another one society will not like, but I don’t care anymore.

Harkening back once again to my wonderful teacher Mrs. Fritz who had us endlessly diagraming sentences in the hopes of teaching us where to properly place adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and all the other sentence components, I humbly ask for her forgiveness for what I’m about to write. To truly advocate for more joy in this world and to truly seek first to understand, I can no longer completely identify as a noun. To be labeled and grouped in with all other people, places, and things isn’t going to cut it for me anymore. From now on, I want to be…Are you ready for it? I want to be…

A VERB!

I want to be action. I want to be the thing that happens and explains nouns. Some will say this article was written early during summer vacation so the many teachers that belong to the Tribe of Up and who read this weekly scribble may not notice or are out town for this week’s edition. But it’s time to throw some generally accepted English rules out the window.

A brief game of word association. Happiness. Joy. Love. Friendship. Empathy. Altruism. Connection. Understanding. Say these words out loud. Don’t worry, no one will hear you. Go ahead. Say them. What are the first things that come to mind when you say those words? Hopefully positive, warm thoughts. On a very practical level, Mrs. Fritz would like those words that were chosen and remind me they are all nouns. They are things. Things that we should attempt to add to proverbial bucket we all carry. Good things to have in the bucket to be sure. Here is the list of words again. Say them out loud one more time.

Happiness. Joy. Love. Friendship. Empathy. Altruism. Connection. Understanding. Now imagine these words are verbs. What if we broke off the part of them that are nouns. What’s left? What if instead of placing these nouns in our bucket we all carry, we live them in our everyday lives? Not keeping them in a bucket but displaying them for all the world to see by how we live. Imagine connection as a verb. Imagine joy. Imagine teaching the next generation by living it in this one. Love is a verb, dear friends. Let happiness be a verb. Let it be an action by how you carry yourself each and every day. We don’t need money or things to let empathy be a verb.

As members of the Tribe of Up, we have a duty to advocate for more joy. We have a duty to do our level best each and every day to live our verbs. Turn those nouns into verbs and show the world what those words can be. Just imagine what the world would look like if that list of words mentioned earlier, happiness, joy, love, friendship, empathy, altruism, connection, and understanding were thought of as verbs far more than nouns. It has to start with someone my friends. I say, let it be us.

Steve Gwisdalla is a Dexter resident and Owner, Chief English Officer, and all-around happy dude of BetterPlace Consulting. If you need help turning your nouns into verbs, reach out to him at steve@betterplacemgmt.com