Turn

Blog6: Turn

Verbs and nouns are essential to communication.  They are the anchor words of expression in addition to facial expression and gestures.  The latter enrich, and to some extent able to bring about meaningful communication where there are no words, yet to fulfill the role. 

Would you choose “to be” or you’d rather “seem”?   I choose to turn … to be doing something.  Turning molds, changes, refines me until I am what I could be, just as clay is at its potter’s shaping.  

In my native Tagalog, the verb turn, ikot, fulfills its linguistic usefulness even though it takes limited forms: something that has completed a turn is umikot or nakaikot.  When a thing is momentarily turning, it is umiikot.  To make something turn, one says paikutin or ikutin.  We also say pinaikot and inikot to mean something was forced to turn.

You’d agree that needed tense and inflection of the verb turn in my native Tagalog takes much simpler expression and conjugation unlike the twists it undergoes in the English language.  Though beleaguering to speakers of other languages, especially those learning English as preferred language of transaction,  American English speak is by far one most inventive in expressing and crafting phrases to go alongside ordinary verbs.  Journey along and indulge me in looking at the active verb, turn.  

Our lives, our times, our actions are a series of turns.

Soon after three hundred sixty and four or five days after birth, we leave infancy to exponentially grow and turn as exploring, curious toddlers.  Before we could note quickly the shooting speed of our age in years, we turn as children, teens, young, and full adults.   Life’s possibilities and promises unfold and lay at our reach, but always - the potential to turn ourselves into something is endless.

Certainly, there is no reversal, no turning back once we act and take a turn at something.  At rest, and upon waking, mind and body dance inside out and weave their turns:  heart pulses, blood flows, lungs breathe, brain processes continuously.  If we care to richly or poorly affect our mind/body’s function and state, we feed it healthy or unhealthy nourishment.  We turn on water to wake, to calm, or cleanse both.   We turn our thoughts to critical decisions that need be made, turn our backs to lackadaisical, unproductive efforts.  We turn inside out our defenses when feeling vulnerable; we turn upside down our world to look for solutions when confronted by situations beyond control.  We keep going until every stone and every barrier is turned up and around.  Of course, we must neither take the stance of arrogance nor get shy from turning about when we know for a fact that we caused blunders.    Doing somebody a good turn may be old fashioned nowadays, but one good turn always matters and one good turn deserves another.

There are even more ways to create verb phrases with “turn”, but you do get my drift, eh?    Enough said of it then.   Go ahead.  Dismiss all terrible turns and take an intentional turn for the better! Make an act of turning good by someone, or of something.