Today as I sat with my venti coffee in the local Starbucks, my mind wandered as I gazed on the buildings just across the street. I was thinking of names. This is one of my favorite past times. I imagined what certain names might look like in the form of a sleek neon sign hovering over the front door of an old brick building. The one that stood over the building I in was “Starbucks”. What does that mean? Actually, nothing. But stick it did.
I thought about what I do in the world. My mission is not to bring coffee to it however. It’s to bring what I do to the world. And what is that? My mind drifted some more as I watched the drab building across the street. Something caught my eye. It was about 5 feet of an orange cable cover just at the top of a telephone poll. It was curved. Half was going up while the other half curved to the left to accommodate the wire heading off in a horizontal direction. That one section of plastic tube jumped out. I thought it was beautiful, the only color in the whole dull scene.
Then I thought of a new verb: To bright. As in “brighting”. Not bright”ening” as some of you are thinking. That loses it. The actual definition has more to do with looking at things in a fundamentally new way. Brightening is more about putting some flowers next to the highway or adding a new light fixture in the dining room.
To bright rhymes with to write. It’s about injecting creativity into the old language. “I have to write an English composition”, becomes “I will bright my English composition”. “I will bright you a letter now” and “I need to keep brighting my novel” capture it.
It’s about leverage. You have this color behind you, -orange- whispering the “bright way” to think of any situation. The possibilities are endless!
So I went home and got to work on crafting some new words to a song I wrote a few months back based on the “This I believe Project” NPR project. I’ll tell you how that turns out in future blogs.
For now, Bright on.
Dan
