The comma, a sentence accessory, is very small and very powerful. Powerful enough to change the meaning of an entire sentence. Before hearing this story about a panda, yes, a panda, the comma had no other importance to my life outside of AP language assignments and college essays.
In this particular panda adventure, it went to eat in a very nice restaurant and ordered a very nice meal and behaved every way any very nice customer should behave.
When the waitress brought him his check, the panda pulled out a gun and fired two shots into the air and began to walk away.
The waitress (instead of running away, which is probably what any sane person would have done) asks the panda, "What are you doing?
The panda responds, "I'm a panda, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do."
The waitress, bewildered, replies with a look a confusion.
With this, the panda pulls out a dictionary, throws it at the waitress, and taunts her with a "Look it up, lady.."
And walks out of the restaurant. (A real 'G' move if you ask me!) The waitress, searching for 'panda' in the dictionary, comes upon this definition: 'a panda is a bear-like animal that's eats bamboo, shoots, and is usually found in Asia.'
Now one might think, what importance does a comma and a panda have to one's life? Well, that's easy. Similar to this panda, we subconsciously have a societal dictionary that we turn to in order to define the characteristics of who we are, what we do, and how we act. And, if we aren't careful, this can become a sad thing when we, like the panda, take our programmed definitions to be so literal.
But, no? One may say. We are unique and different in our own way because that's how we were created, and that may be true. But the simple fact is, because the society that we live in is so subliminal that we never stop to question why every person is trying so hard to fall into the same pattern of life? Or how every human beings' description is similar to the next?
How much difference do we truly see between one another in the world? We live by the pamphlets we are given telling us how to make the "best" decisions, but how could a paper apply the same to every person's situation? We live by the guidelines plastered into the brains of four year olds (times before we are even allowed to think for ourselves). We live by the denotative meanings of life and we don't even know it's a problem because it is what we've always believed to be the correct way of living.
The more and more I think about this, the more I am inclined to further look into the phrase: "Stop and smell the roses." Living life is not living when you're not living and you're just... Obeying. And it's scary to stop and smell the roses because many times it's scary to think that maybe, just maybe, we are more of mythical zombie-like creatures than we think. Maybe it's scary to think that such small nuisances, such as a comma, could change such a big picture. Our lives are sentences, that we are allowed to change and edit ourselves instead of letting them be written by society's pen.
No matter how much we would like to be individuals, we cannot when we are limited. No matter how much freedom we believe we have, it is an illusion, blocked by the dictionary in our faces. And like the panda, we will carry around our loaded guns following our definitions like first grades using their finger to follow along in a book. We are not words, we are human, and though life is a sentence, unlike that sentence, we will never be perfect and we must always dare to be ourselves.
