There is a moment, just before a wave breaks, when the world feels suspended. Not calm—charged. We are there now. It can be felt in the headlines, in the strained pitch of voices trying to explain the unexplainable, in the silence following each new outrage before another begins. These are not ordinary times. The word is not centered, it is on edge.
When the world tips like this, language shifts. Words get louder, shorter, blunter. Complexity flattens into slogans. Conversations become declarations. Meaning is treated like currency—traded quickly, without checking for counterfeits. We begin to speak in warnings rather than invitations.
In moments like these, we tend to look backward. To the last time things were “normal,” to the last crisis we survived, to the last figure who promised certainty. Nostalgia arrives not as comfort but as escape. It promises a past which never truly existed, but in doing so, keeps us from facing the truth of the present.
What happens next is not written, but it is patterned.
Historically, moments of profound instability are always followed by a period of redefinition. Not restoration, but redefinition. This is the edge we are standing on now. The systems cracking around us—governments, markets, education, technology, even language—will not be mended by returning to what they were. They will demand to be remade.
This is why art matters more now than ever. Our ability of self expression is key. Not because it soothes, but because it speaks the future into form before politics can. Outside. Because art listens differently. It gathers scattered meanings and makes them whole again. The artist does not avoid the edge—they make a home there. In doing so, they remind the rest of us of how to live forward.
This week, the word on edge is a threshold. This is not collapse, not crisis: Threshold. Remember this word. It means we still have agency. We can still choose what story we are entering, which voice we will follow, which truths we will carry.
There will be those who rush to fill the vacuum with old language, recycled answers, louder control. We must not yield the pen so easily. The edge is where new language is born. It is not safe; it is alive.
Let us not retreat from this discomfort. Listen carefully to the word at the edge of forming, then speak it, not with certainty, but with courage.
What happens next is being written.
Let it not be dictated, let it be composed. Here. Everywhere.
Word is our freedom. Use it while we can.
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BE true to yourselves.
Beautiful. Necessary. Thank you!
Thank you. I needed these words today.