We need a language for the living. Yes, we need the big narratives and manifestos, but that’s not where it begins. It begins in simple conversations. In the moments where we let go of who we think we need to be and choose to be present instead. Where we stop speaking about the world and start speaking with it - where we release our need to control

We need words for the in-between spaces. For the process. For what isn’t finished yet. For the complex things we can still feel. For what takes time. For what simply is.

The future no longer feels shared, and we have few new stories about what we’re moving toward. We know far more about what we shouldn’t do than about what we must.

a living language demands what our modern language has trained out of us: vulnerability, presence, time. You can’t streamline connection. It asks us to stay. To listen. To listen intensely, so we can hear the nuance in others too.

We sometimes call it intuition, but it’s really the sum of inherited and lived experience telling you what matters right now.

Language works when two people’s associations overlap enough. When their worlds drift too far apart, it falters. We hear the same words, but they spark different images. The conversation comes undone. We think we’re communicating with words, but we’re really communicating our entire worlds.

When a society loses its shared stories, it also loses its

Language is much larger than the words themselves. The real language lives in what isn’t said. In what gets filtered out. In everything resting between the lines.

Tor Nørretranders calls this exformation - the hidden background of experience, associations, memories, culture, and bodily knowledge that makes meaning possible in the first place.

how can I understand what I feel if I don’t have words for it? And how, then, could I ever hope to be understood?

We’ve lost vocabulary for the complex, the not-yet-formed, the things that aren’t yes or no. The things that are both grief and relief. Love and frustration. Our modern language rewards clarity, speed, unambiguity. But life is rarely binary. It’s contradictory, uneven, full of in-betweens. The things that matter most are hard to say - and even