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Exploring wellbeing through the grammar of being well

So often we link wellness to adjectives of positivity. The smiley-face emojis, the sun on the cloud-to-rainbow chart, the inspirational goals we are told to set ourselves, ‘don’t worry, be happy’. It’s a clear trajectory from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ and a linear pipeline to wellbeing. In emphasizing only good, as ‘good-enough’, we are already setting the bar high, as just sustaining good can be exhausting. Yet, in a neo-liberal, competitive, capitalist society, ‘good’ on its own is actually rarely enough. We are constantly looking for ‘better’ and then ‘best’.   To be ‘better’ is to compare ourselves constantly against others. This comes at a risk to wellbeing. In trying to be ‘better’ there is a suggestion that there may be something wrong within us, something that needs ‘fixing’. Yet, if we subscribe to the concept of neurodiversity, and embrace the neurodiversity paradigm, we understand that each of us navigates and interacts with the world in uniquely dynamic and fluid ways. A sing...
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The rhizomic heritage of languaging and communication


Weeding in my garden this weekend, I was struck by the lack of borders shown by the roots of the ground elder I was chasing. Were they aware of the border between my garden and that of my neighbour? No, they were evidently not. The transitory, indiscriminate, and notional boundary of control, posed by the fence line, was of no importance or consequence. The imposition of rule and order was irrelevant for these plants to thrive. This got me thinking about languaging and communication.

 

All the rules and borders and impositions and standards may be there on the surface, yet underneath, languaging and communication just keep on being. Digging deep I saw too all the multitude of roots of the plant, the big ones, the fine ones, in all directions and at varying depths. This was expansive. Communication and language are equally expansive; multi-modal and multi-temporal. Their exact medium or mode fits the environment. Languaging and communication flourish most naturally in understanding spaces, where left to just be, and not subjugated to false levels of control.

 

To see the beauty of languaging and communication we just need to step away from the borders, allow ourselves permission and freedom to embrace all possibilities, rather than stringently adhering only to the narrowest bandwidth of human experience.

 

I daresay I haven't got all the roots of the ground elder. I'm pretty sure it will come back. My own rule and order is likely to be bested. Nature will find a way. When we stop seeing ourselves as being in control, and realise it is being part of and joining in with the experience that matters, we see too that communication and language were never really static, despite being held to account in dictionaries and grammars. Communication and language have always been moving and living experiences, open to innovation and creativity at any point, and by anyone. How can we control and label something that at its heart simply cannot be contained? We cannot!

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