What is counting but looking for the end? Searching for a topic for today’s ponderings discernment is the whim that has struck my fancy at this moment in time. It is a curious word. The thesaurus in Microsoft Word which is the short form, for me, of looking up a word says that it is judgment, acumen, discrimination, perspicacity, taste, shrewdness, and sensitivity. Curious in the range of words used as synonyms, and the thought that one must engage in order to glean the manner in which each of these words fit the description of the word. Certainly judgment is not a stretch in that it implies a choice, or decision as to quality.
Real dictionary has discernment as – “The act or process of exhibiting keen insight and good judgment.” Insight is a talent and natural in its application, regardless of any thought to the contrary. Insight is not a learned behavior, but a capacity for comprehension. It is an aptitude or ability to envisage that which others seek and search, and occurs naturally in those who possess it. But to what end? Do I want to be able to see the future? I am not capable of prestidigitation where it comes to my feelings, and a measure of ability to willfully separate the truth from fiction is something I have been alternately blessed or cursed with. I have had time when the obvious result of a situation appears disastrous and is, in fact thus. Other times I find myself quite merry over the discovery that my discernment of a situation is erroneous.
Acumen elicits an entire page in itself given the cacophony of seemingly differing synonyms that pop up when I hit Shift F7. For my purposes it means expertise. Again a conflict in that insight, the main symptom of discernment, is not a quantifiable quality. It just is. Acumen might also elicit thoughts of ability, and therein offers justification for the synonymonic response. Synonymonic being a word I just made up that I will be submitting for inclusion to Webster’s…as soon as I figure out what it means as opposed to how cool it sounded in that sentence.
On a side note, I have submitted a number of items for publication this last week that have yet to come to fruition and I am in need of said publishing if just to ease my trepidation as to my future as the next Great American Author. Ego is not necessarily synonymous conceit, in this case it covers a variety of sins; low self esteem, depression, or delusionary psychosis
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I am writing this piece as a part of the daily writing I engage in and it’s original purpose, or title sentence is a function of what I seek in my daily writing which is seven hundred and fifty words. The style sheet for my daily writing taught that one should start every day by writing three pages in order to get the creative juices flowing. There were no instructions as to what that writing should be as long as it is written. Well, my handwriting is, as my father once declared (accurately I might add), “chicken scratch.” When I do hand write anything more then two or three lines I myself can not read the lexis of my efforts. As a teacher I know that a handwritten page, if properly spaced, contains approximately two hundred and fifty words.
Hence, when I sit at the keyboard and type that translates into one single spaced typewritten page. Each typewritten page contains forty lines. When I have no true inspiration I have a tendency to type random words until I reach a topic. Sometimes that works and other time it is an exercise in futility. When I do find myself in that horrid dwelling that holds no reasonable thought, I count lines. I spent the better part of an afternoon researching this quantity and discovering how that might be displayed on the screen before me. This is another example of the uselessness that is counting. Here I sit, or did sit trying to see something that would allow me to count lines and it was already a default setting on the software readily visible to me if I had but looked, with discernment, at the screen before me and not put my self into the trap that counting will place one in the literary arts. What cause can there be to count the words and lines of a truly inspired work of prose? Today, it was to the make it the end of the page. Hmmm…seven hundred and seventy two words. The end.
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