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I write about mindfulness

umim alilot
umim alilotSocial Life
Photo by Joey Nicotra on Unsplash

It is universally acknowledged, that in-law are mostly annoying. That was also the case for me.

I was always annoyed by mine. She was the type that never stops talking, never wants to admit her mistake, and she always has to know everything (even when she doesn’t and ended up talking gibberish).

Unfortunately, these are the kind of people that I hated the most. But I know, at some point, I have to accept this.

So the question is, “how?”

Language Encroachment

I was always been curious about language. Somehow when I speak English, I could be franker than when I spoke Bahasa, that’s when I started doing my research.

At first, I thought that culture affects language. I thought I felt different when I spoke English because of the influence the westerner have upon the language until I found studies that say the other way around.

The paper was done by 4 people in the Faculty of Business & Commerce in Cambridge. The title is: “Representation of color concepts in bilingual cognition: The case of Japanese blues”.

The research was concentrated on the differences of the same word in 2 different languages. Unlike English speakers who only have one word for “blue”, Japanese speakers have 2 words for blue, mizuiro for a lighter blue, and ao for a darker blue.

They found out that people who speak Japanese can distinguish the color blue better than English speakers. Wait! there’s more.

The Himba Tribe in Africa has 12 terms for the color green and somehow, they can even tell the distinctions between similar colors green that we can’t even begin to see the difference.

If you think that perception of color cannot be correlated by other psychological things, then you need to read the next one:

Another survey was conducted on the Italians and Germans:

They were asked “if the moon has a gender, what would it be?”.

Turns out most Italians will perceive the moon as a female and the Germans perceive the moon as male.

This turns out because in Italian, the word moon is translated to “La Luna” which is a common name for woman, and in German, it’s “Mond” which honestly sounded more manly.

Then it clicks on me. If words really have these kinds of power over people’s minds, can I influence mine only by changing how I think?

The Power of Words

I started to change how I think in each situation that I usually “hate”.

Instead of the word “hate”, I use “not prefer”.

Whenever my mother-in-law started her really annoying behaviors, instead of thinking: “gosh, I hate this!”, I changed it to “I prefer not to listen to her, but If I must, then so be it”.

And it’s magical!

A simple change from hate to unpreferred has changed how I think of every annoying situation. I don’t feel much hate or annoyance, nor anger anymore.

Only by changing one word, I change my relationship with her for the better. It also transformed my relationship with everyone including my emotion and awareness.

I started becoming more aware of what people are saying and the emotions that follow. I become a better listener, calmer, and more mindful.

It’s magical, how a single word can change your life.

Hi, I’m Michael. I write about mindfulness, meditation, and overall human growth. I am a certified mindfulness practitioner (certified by Achology).

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