Profound thought for the Task
Withdraw attention from past + future. Step out of the time dimension in everyday life.
– Eckhart Tolle
The task: Find an interesting word in the dictionary and phone your wife to tell her about it.
I like interesting words. But there is one person close to me who likes interesting words more than I do. That’s my wife. I think this is because she is multi-lingual and has a capacity to learn new words quickly and want to understand their etymology. Unless that’s the study of animals, I forget the correct word. Kind of ironic that I can’t remember the right word for the origin of words I suppose.
Anyway, this task was made easier because my sister gave me a book for Christmas, and it had loads of words in it. I know that’s what books are expected to have, so nothing so unusual in that – but this book was a book about interesting words. I think that finding an interesting word in a dictionary would have been harder than finding an interesting word in a book about interesting words. I suppose I would have found a word fairly quickly in a big dictionary, but big dictionaries are hard to find in my house, and those that do exist are falling apart because they were printed somewhere early in the last century.
So I reached for the new book about interesting words in the expectation that I would quickly find a few suitable candidates to tell my wife about. The book is called ‘Words for Life”, by Susie Dent. You might find it the link, and you can buy it for yourself as long as you don’t buy it from Am*z*n. In the book there is an unusual English word or phrase for each day of the year. Initially I thought I could just choose the word of the date and use that – but I didn’t find the word interesting enough for my wife to be phoned-up about.
After a trawl through a few pages of the book (un-put-downable!), I found a suitable interesting word, and I put the book down. It stayed on the coffee table. The word I had chosen was ‘philocoly’ which, Susie Dent tells me, is from the Greek philo meaning love, and kalos meaning beautiful. What a lovely beautiful word, I thought. An ideal word to interrupt my lovely beautiful wife with.
Philocoly means to take pleasure in the small joys of life – pausing to appreciate what is happening on our doorstep or loving beautiful things wherever we may find them. Since this is exactly the sort of thing Ilka does every day, I knew she’d appreciate having a word to describe it.
And in the aforementioned book, there is a short extract from a poem by W.H.Davies which is also fitting.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
This is describing mindfullness and being able to step out from the hum-drum rush of everyday life, to appreciate something otherwise overlooked. Or as Eckhart says in the profound though that accompanied this task to ‘ Step out of the time dimension in everyday life’.
I didn’t phone Ilka with the word, because we live in a different age now. Ten years ago I would have interrupted her in an important meeting with a phone call, but the current interrupter of choice is WhatsApp. I left a voice message with the word and the definition. Later, I explained why I did it. She was very happy, and that was a philocolistic moment.
Withdraw attention from past + future tenses. Step out of the time dimension with newly found words.
