Skip to main content

What is a beautiful word?

Image
By
This is a chapter from my fourth book called When hunger yearns

I woke up early and took a bath. I changed into comfortable clothing and I said my prayers and I laid down waiting for the rain they said we would get after midnight. While I was bathing a question entered my head. What is the most beautiful word? Beauty is subjective and there is beauty in all words. There are fancy sounding words and words from foreign languages and hardly heard of words and words that are hard to pronounce. There are simple words and words with little fanfare and words of frustration and words that make us giggle. There are all kinds of words that are beautiful in their own way. Napoleon Hill has told us that, "The most beautiful words in the world may well be that sweet, old-fashioned two-letter word, we." A simple word that signifies unity and connection.

For me a beautiful word is a word that can express "peace of mind". I discovered the Swedish word lugn and I fell in love with it. It means calm, peaceful or still. It does not directly translate to peace of mind but I love it still (pun intended). The Swedish word for peace of mind is sinnesfrid. Fred is the Swedish word for peace. Frid also translates as peace. Sinnes translates as mental or of the mind. Sinneslugn is calmness. I read that lugn can be transformed into an adverb, lugnt, for example in the phrase "ta det lugnt!" which means "take it easy!" You can also say "det ar lungt" or "no worries". Lugn comes from Old Swedish to mean the calm surface of a lake. Then sometimes spelt lygn.

While researching I learnt that god is a Swedish word for good. So if you said "god natt" you would be saying "good night" and "god dag" for "good day". Dag is very close to the English word dog. And just yesterday I was asking Gemini if there was any link between dog being God spelt backwards. They do say that dog is man's best friend. Could be something there man. Interestingly enough the Swedish word for God is Gud. So if I had to describe this interplay in English it would be "God is good and good is God". Gig and gig and that makes me giggle. Giggle can be expanded to "God is good. God loves everyone." Keeping with this trend of thought, lugn can be expanded as "Love under God's name". Love has a name and that name is God. When I Google this phrase I get a beautiful song by the group Jesus Culture called Love Has A Name. I am a Muslim and the song makes perfect sense to me if the word Jesus was replaced with the word God. I like the following two lines from the song the most, "There's an answer to every question mark" and "There's a laughter that wipes away all tears". When I listened to an interview with the vocalist after the end of the song she talks about God and she talks about customizing the song. We are all one under God and we can learn from each other even if we believe differently. When I think back to the word lugn, I think about our lungs. We all breathe the same air. We long for love. One love. I will end this chapter with the same quote I ended an earlier chapter with. Do you remember which chapter? Rumi wrote, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How do we fix this world?

By
It is 4:39 pm and I have decided to write. It is a peaceful and quiet day. I am thinking about God, and how this life is a test. There is so much happening in this world that could make us sad. But we do not have to remain in that sadness when we put our trust in God. God wants good for us. God wants us to experience peace, and even happiness, despite what surrounds us. How do we fix this world? My friend Chatty suggests that maybe a better question is: What kind of person do I choose to be in this world? Because when enough people answer that question well, that is how real change begins. I want to be the kind of person that God is pleased with. Someone guided by God, not by ego. Someone who chooses patience over anger, humility over pride, and sincerity over appearances. I am doing reasonably well, but I am not perfect. And maybe perfection is not the goal. Growth is. Awareness is. Returning to what is right, again and again, is. I want to grow, and I will keep adjusting myself when ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hobby project - Store and view exchange rates

By
The next step in my project was to test out being able store and display the rates in a database. I decided to use nodejs and supabase for this. Everything worked beautifully. Only hickup was the following error due to my package.json not being correct. SyntaxError: Cannot use import statement outside a module Added this to package.json   "type": "module" This works beautifully. Right now I am just testing fragments of what could be part of a bigger system to see what is possible and what works and how easy to code on a mobile. There is no fully functioning integrated end to end system just yet. This is also what I tested. A serverless append-only database using GitHub + Actions + Pages. That’s basically a lightweight backend system. This was the ChatGPT prompt I used. Guide me through each step. This is what I want. A manually run github actions that adds to docs/data.json with the current date and time. docs/index.html displays all the entries in data.json. Make s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mundane

By
It is 123am and I have decided to write. I have this new idea for a book called Mundane. It would be me writing about the ordinary. We chase the extraordinary but there is beauty in the ordinary. There is beauty in the simple. There is beauty in the everyday. What about God? We often think about God in grand terms. But what if God is simple too? What if God is mundane? What if we look for God in the everyday moments? I sit in this dark room with the air conditioning on. The fan is also on. The curtain is down but I imagine the moonlight shining on the grass outside. The cats are probably sleeping. I wonder if anyone else in the neighbourhood is awake at this hour? Is there another writer around who is also writing about the mundane? The fan breeze helps the air conditioning cool me down. These nights are warm otherwise. A mosquito flies across my screen. Hello friend or foe. I cannot quite decide which one. If I had a swatter you would be gone. I check my notifications and there is an ...
Post a Comment
Read more