10 Words

“She judged her life by the moments of greatest sadness and greatest happiness, but she lived in the moments in-between.”

The above sentence was my attempt at a challenge (issued by Soul Pancake) to write a ten-word biography. Mine, if you counted, is not ten words. It’s twenty. With my apologies to Mr. Shakespeare, I must confess that brevity is not the soul of my wit (which would also explain why “packing light” is a foreign concept to me).

I was intrigued, as I am by so many things, by the challenge to condense a life into ten words. Words can have so many meanings and carry a certain kind of power. Ten words together could make quite a statement. But as I started to think about which ten words might apply to me, I realized the challenge was harder then it looked.

10 descriptive words in a row (e.g., smart, funny, short, etc) would help form a picture, but it would be incomplete and wouldn’t say enough about my character or personality. Descriptive words wouldn’t tell someone how I react to situations or what I thought about a particular issue. 10 words as a sentence would be more encompassing, but how do you boil down 27 years of experience into ten words, some of which would have to be conjunctions and articles (and thus have little impact on the overall meaning of the sentence)?

We’re all so much more complicated and dynamic than ten words. Our lives are messy, difficult, happy, tragic, joyful, funny, serious, beautiful and just about every other adjective ever known. Reducing an existence down to ten words does that life a disservice.

I do understand the broader idea behind the challenge – stripping away the clutter and adornments to get to the essential core. But I guess even though I understand it, I still can’t embrace a ten-word limit when I know we’re all so much more.

What do you think? Could you write a ten-word biography?