PUNCTUATIONS

“A woman, without her man, is nothing.”
“A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

"The student said the teacher is crazy."
"The student, said the teacher, is crazy."

Notice how the punctuation marks change the messages? These use the same exact words, but with different use and placement of the punctuation marks, the thoughts change.

Michael Abramovitch introduced me to the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" a few years ago. It is where the examples above came from. The author, Lynn Truss, says punctuation marks "....are traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, or stop." Punctuation marks enable us to deliver a clear message. Conversely, misuse or lack of it, blurs what we are trying to say.
The same is true with spoken words. We need to pay attention to our punctuation marks to deliver our messages clearly. We need to pause, stop, and breathe. They are traffic signals, indeed.

But there are other punctuations we have in our lives that we also need to understand.

How many times have we said "That's it! Period!" only to realize that maybe, our statements are not true or in accurate? How many times have we exclaimed and made a fuzz about some things not really worth getting excited about? How many times have we questioned things we did not fully understand only because we have been too stubborn or lazy or busy to even try?

We use a lot of punctuations in our lives. We think we believe things because we grew up hearing them. We react a certain way to certain things because that's how our parents reacted. We have declared a ''period" in many of our beliefs because that's how we have been conditioned, and for some of us, for the good or for the bad, we cling on to those periods. It's kind of like being born to one political party and sticking with it only because the family did so, not bothering to create our own views and convictions.

My friend and her husband of over 20 years divorced a few years ago. Before the divorce, both she and her husband took turns in coming to me and venting about each other. I had been honest with both of them and called them out if I thought they were out of line. They got mad at me sometimes, but they came to me anyway. What made me sad the most is how these two people who once loved each other and had children together could say such hurtful things about each other. Then I realized that for my friend, hurtful words were what she grew up hearing. She told me of how her mother would speak to her - putting her down, robbing her of self-worth, using cruel words to discipline her. I observed her do the same, not only to her husband, but also to her children. She accepted her mother's "period". She mirrored her mother.

But her daughter is different. This young woman observed, questioned, and decided that she would not be part of that cycle. Her mother's hurtful words made her careful of her own - making sure what she says build and not break, love and not hate, comfort and not hurt. She broke her grandmother's period and created her own.

The fact is, not all statements are permanent, nor are they always true. We have to be open to other possibilities, to other views, to other truths, and to other statements. We have to carefully observe, listen, evaluate and then form our OWN views. Things happen in our lifetime that should make us question some of what had been passed on to us, lest we impose the same archaic views on the generations after us. I would not be able to make a good life in this country if it weren't for the people who believed in racial equality and fought for it.

While we love our parents and value their input in our lives, we also have to understand from which lenses they looked at things. I grew up in a small community that voted for whoever the "padrino" said everyone should vote for. My parents, peasant farmers and poorly educated like the rest of the community, followed this "rule" without questions. When my older brothers reached voting age, they told our parents they could not vote for someone they did not believe in, regardless of what the "padrino" says. My parents were scared and did not understand at first, but they respected their children. They were of another generation. They were not well educated. They did not have a voice. Their children went to school, they asked questions, formed their views, found their voice, and used it.

We meet people along the way with different views. Do we listen to them or do we tune them out because they are different from what we thought they ought to be? Maybe the statements we thought were settled, defined and finished are really not. Maybe we should have more question marks than periods. Maybe once in a while, we could temper our exclamation points with a dash - a pause - and attempt to understand, not just shoot the opposing view down.

A statement, no matter how many times it is repeated, does not make its contents true. Its truth lies in facts. We need to scrutinize it to find the facts.

PERIOD.