Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. I’m working my way through The Immortality Key by Brian C Muraresku, and a recurring theme is the true message of some ancient text being lost in translation.
Muraresku is a modern day Indiana Jones and his book walks you through his years long quest for an understanding of the world’s oldest religion.
It’s easy to get lost in the swagger and swashbuckling that Harrison Ford portrays on screen, and forget that behind every adventure in a lost temple, were hours buried in a book studying the ancient languages.
Muraresku embarks on an adventure that only he can, because in the end he is the only one able to read the treasure map. A student of the classics, he meticulously follows breadcrumbs left in a mixture of Latin, ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Castellan, German, and English.
What he finds are the clues that have been hiding in plain sight, in large part due to translation gaffes, either unwitting or intentional.
Following Muraresku’s story I’m reminded how fragile our communication really is. There are so many opportunities for our message to be “lost in translation” on a day to day basis, even without the perils of centuries old dead language.
Muraresku demonstrates, in sometimes hard to follow detail, the effort and energy required to find the intended message through translation. What we are left with is a different message entirely. Which begs the question why don’t we put that same effort into our everyday communication? After all, we are mostly speaking the same language not trying to revive the original content from a centuries forgotten dialect.
From inadequate ability to encode our feelings into a message, transmitting that message through a faulty medium, or improper decoding of the message, everyday communication is a minefield that demands precise navigation.
A value has been placed on instantaneous data transmission, at the expense of verification, which is a much more time and labor intensive process. Who cares what you felt, how you’ve grown and changed, and what message you wanted to disseminate, when the 140 characters you tweeted a decade ago are readily available for instant scrutiny?
The desire to be understood, to clearly communicate our wants and desires to others, is universal, and begins as soon as we are born. Yet somehow the same desire to understand, and to properly translate the incoming message has been left lagging behind.
Whether it is a frustrated child, a tired spouse, or a centuries old prophet, we could all find a little more serenity, by taking the time to translate the message and communicate better.
Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.
