Us humans and our words are, all at once and more: fascinating, wondrous, boring, horrifying.

Within that gamut exists pithy phrases encrusted in so much motivational bullshit, and sautéed in whatever acrid juices can be wrung from our already-parched enthusiasm, that it sometimes amazes me we have anything creative left over.

“You can do anything you put your mind to.”

“Failure is not an option.”

“There are no traffic jams along extra mile.”

Now, there’s a glaring hypocrisy on my part here, but I’ll come back to that shortly.

My gripe with this flavor of psuedo-motivational jibber jabber is not that it’s often false (it is), or that it’s reflective of a paid-for or otherwise homogenously-sanctioned “implicit good” that goes unchallenged (it is).

It’s that we’re supposed to take that unchallenged perspective, gobble it whole, and be grateful for the bounty laid before us.

“It is what it is.”

But every once in a while, you come across something so eloquent that it sidesteps any possible comparison or lumping-in with the aforementioned, half-hearted drivel.

“You cannot walk with both feet planted firmly on the ground.

“Forward movement...[]...requires the repetition of imbalance.”^[1]

It’s the labor of writers, artists, and creatives of all types to navigate some nebulous yet meaningful line in the sand, knowing that most of our work does little more than leave the faintest wrinkle soon washed away in the evening tide.

This passage, far from an indistinguishable wrinkle, reveals something insightful, and lays bare my earlier hypocrisy.

It’s insightful not merely because its author, Odelia, says something plainly true, but she does so with a poetic economy of words. “Repetition of imbalance” particularly tickles my brain. It’s not only a well-crafted phrase, but is evocative of, and yet elevated from, the same language used in the previous motivational drivel.

It’s excruciatingly simple, can stand^[2] alone on the merits of that simplicity; yet, it has the linguistic legs to metaphorically extend much further.

And here’s the hypocrisy: this “poetic economy of words,” this simplicity saturated with an optional layer of “much more” – ideas artfully condensed to unfold with a trippy kaleidoscope of further meanings, themes, and interpretations?

That’s little more than a preference; my preference. I like art laden with hidden meanings and complexities, gesturing at larger patterns.

And that preference undoubtedly stems from the perfunctory chemical reward I get when using my innate personality traits, and the skills I’ve practiced, to uncover (or invent) hidden meanings.

It’s an “identity investment bias.”

Sitting opposite my hypocrisy is the obvious fact that someone else’s preference (many someone elses’ preferences!) are specifically for the stuff I called “half-hearted drivel.” And! Those same sentiments likely originated from someone else’s fully-hearted intentions, even if to me now they sound like co-opted baloney.

Someone else (maybe you!) would opt for any of the truishisms I melodramatically maligned, over my brand of jibber jabber any day of the week.

And that’s one of the coolest aspects of language.

The best lines and ideas re-reveal themselves. They leave an impression that invites contemplation. They invite more of the reader.

But, “best” is always subjective. Even the most critically-revered have critics.

So, beyond the shrill reminder that our individual preferences are constantly clouding what we think of as “good,” we should also strive to leave more space for the vignettes; the incomplete or uninspired thoughts. It might be someone else’s new favorite take on the topic.