recycling-bin.jpgWise men always said that words are like arrows on a bow. Once released, they never come back but hover around in the universe. I wonder, what would you say about the written word?

Writers and writing coaches like to rail against flabby writing. But what if this verbal clutter wasn’t just getting in the way of us writing with clarity and style – what if it was also draining the vital resources of the planet?

Those innumerable blogs, sms blitz on a million mobiles, reams of emails are probably lying in the hinterland of the universe somewhere, words that we need no more.

Even when we hit the trash icon on our computer screens and feel happy to clear the trash from our computers and servers, does it go away completely? Or does it just get released in the digital world to rot and fester away for years?

The eco experts have already expressed alarm over the piling junk in space with nearly half a century of our space exploration programmes.

There is junk from spent rocket stages, hatches blown off space shuttles, paint fragments chipped of shuttles travelling at incredible speeds and old, rusted satellites, floating around us hundreds of light years away.

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Space scientists have estimated that these orbit at a speed of roughly 17, 500 miles/hour and can cause havoc if they were to hit travelling space shuttles.

But even if they didn’t, to even imagine so much junk moving at a mind boggling speed in the wastelands of our universe is a chilling idea. That is concrete waste and one can probably deal with it. But what do you do with abstract waste like that of discarded words?

Surely the champions of reuse and recycle must have put their thinking caps on to decide how they could put to use those millions of words floating around in the back-alleys of our universe.

Maybe we could cut out the you from a thank-you and use it in another letter that requires the pronoun, or we could combine a “good” from yet another discarded “good night” and use it as a stand alone adjective in another place….

The possibilities are limitless. If only this could be made electronically possible, we could just capture those words and trap them in a giant lexicon.

But how do we recall that junk from space to be able to recycle? Maybe be some computer geek might invent a “recycle trash” icon that will help us hit the rewind button on our past work.

It would help to use more feel-good words, more pleasantries, softer, melodious incantations that might at least make the pile of garbage more bearable if not endearing.

After all, the same wise men who told us that words were like arrows released from a bow have also told us that words give off positive and negative vibrations that linger long after you have said or written something.

If you want the positive vibrations to linger around you like a ripple in the water, release only the positive ones from your quiver.