Because It Speaks In Words

There is a difference between knowing something, and truly understanding it. I think we've all had those moments, the ones where a truth you learned a long time ago really sits with you for the first time. It rests in your mind and stretches out, finally showing off the great expanse of nuance hidden deep within.Photo: mine.Most nights when you happen to spy the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus sitting in a line in the sky, you see them as the dots beside a crescent that they are. Yet sometimes, when framed amid the sunset sky above the wisps of silver cloud, you see them differently. You realize in that moment that you, your great-grandparents, Julius Caesar, and Aristotle all saw this same sky. It has always been for us. We know so much about Jupiter and Venus today, yet no human eye has ever seen more than you're seeing now.I think we are all, in this time, realizing the true power of words and what they mean, not to those who speak, but to those who listen.The Power of StoriesIt was Eugene Wigner who famously wrote about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the Natural Sciences, the empirical fact that advanced math is eerily accurate at predicting the behavior of nature, so much so that, for me, it can seem like mathematics is perhaps the true language that nature speaks.However, as children, we do not grow up with an innate understanding of complex mathematics, of this foundational language of nature. Instead we are all born with the innate desire to hear and to tell stories, of ourselves, of others, and of the world around us. Our well-known cognitive biases push us to accept stories that rhyme over those that do not, and believe the people we speak to. That last one is particularly important in this age because there are simply so many words out there ready to be believed.Stories are how we share information and how we've warned, cast out, and praised each other for millenia. We tell stories, to ourselves and to others, about why we are successful (or no