Dropping little hints

I am always amazed by the power of good writing to touch our emotions and even sometimes change the direction of our lives. It seems an impossible task for words on paper to accomplish, and yet they do. All the time. Words have power. Words, once spoken or written, have a life of their own, floating from one person’s consciousness to another. Sometimes words make us happy, sometimes they make us sad. Sometimes they do both at the same time, a bittersweet mix of emotion reflecting the complex realities that make up our lives. Sometimes the words are explicit and obvious, changing our perceptions in the span of a single solid gasp for air as our entire bodies react viscerally to the power of the thing. Other times, they are subtle and complicated, wandering around in the recesses of our minds dropping little hints of their meaning, exerting their influece for quite a while before we realize they’ve changed something within us.

Sometimes we don’t even realize the power the words have had over us until later, much later. Sometimes years later. Sometimes we never figure it out, letting the hints others have dropped upon us alter our very being little by little without ever coming to understand the source of our now-ingrained attitudes.

Every once in a while, I come upon a masterful piece of writing that is in itself not a complicated thing. It doesn’t require depth of thought, or close examination, or even a dictionary. The hints are not subtle. They fall left and right as fast as they can like some crazy rainstorm delivering a message as loudly as possible. Simple. Direct. Honest.

Life-changingly beautiful.

Sometimes, someone takes a piece of powerful writing that could be a rainstorm all on its own and turns it into an award-winning short movie that will leave you smiling all day. Together the words and images create a tornado of emotion, twirling around each other in a majestic symphony of completely unsubtle hint-dropping that leaves you breathless. Like this: