Have you ever thought about changing nouns into adverbs?

We talk about love, nature, beauty, insight, relationships, friendships, moments, elements, creation, a thought and a situation.

But what if we make adverbs and verbs out of these nouns? What if we call:

Love → loving

Nature → naturing

Beauty → beautifying

Insights → insightful

Relationships → relationing, relating

Friendship → befriending

Moments → momentary

Elements → elementary

Creation → to Create

Thought → thinking

How does our connection to them change? And do these adverbs and verbs even exist? Do they make sense to us, can we relate? Or do they lose their meaning the moment we change them into a doing, an acting, a feeling, a more momentary acting word?

Love and Loving and the Delicate Difference between the two

I pondered about love for a while when I read the book The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm where he talks about the art of loving and that this is an act we can learn. But that it is something else then Love in itself. Love is something more universal, but to experience love, we need to be loving. We need to learn the act of loving.

And the act of loving includes being kind to the other person, being interested, listening, being there for the other person, laughing together, and caring for each other. It is those moments that we can create through a loving act and thus loving is the art of loving another person and love may be experienced when two people both do loving acts towards each other.

What if we use the difference not only in love and loving, but also in other nouns and their connected counterparts?

Nouns and its connected counterparts in more than Love

Thought → thinking

A thought may come to us like a marble rolling down a dice - sharp, quick, fleeting. It may disappear the moment we try to hold it. It comes and goes. But thinking? Thinking is there for us to stay, to hold on, to calm down, to focus and concentrate on a thought, on more than a thought. It is the act of thinking, the act of thinking about the thought, and thus, interacting with the thought and keeping it within us.

It is a more active, concentrated act. And when we do have a thought, and another thought and a third thought, we may not be able to speak of thinking, as there was not a mere act involved, but simply a thought that entered our conscious being for a short, sharp amount of time.

But with thinking, it was not the fleeting moment of a thought, it was a present, conscious act of interacting with whatever came up subconsciously, acting upon it, acting with it, looking at it from various perspectives, and deciding whether to act in various other ways with that thought that passed our conscious mind.

When we have a thought, we may never call us a thinker. But when we think, we may, over time, become a thinker. By practicing the mere act of thinking more than once, more often over time, which makes us a thinker with time. We practiced the science and art of thinking and can say - I know how to think. I may improve my way to interact with my thought and proactively integrate and create new ones, but overall, I am a thinker, a practicing thinker, and maybe one day I may call me a thinker with a sub-category of thinking, a thinker by thinking about specific topics, a thinker by thinking in a specific way. Or connecting different ways of thinking. Adding reasoning, perspective switching, analysis, and so on.

Nature → Naturing

This may be a bit of a more odd connection. We see nature. Nature is all around us. We often speak of nature and nurture, when we speak about the difference of what shapes us and our lives. Nature is what comes from our genes, our bodily nature, and nurture is what is given to us through other people, nature, everything that happens after we have been born.

In any case, nature is all around us. It is what shapes us, our environment, the trees, gardens, grass, forests. It is what needs to be on our earth for us to survive, to give us oxygen.

What is naturing now? We can nature our planet but giving and providing it with more greens, with more nature and surround us with more nature. We can plant trees, flowers and build gardens. We can stroll through more nature.

We can try to bring more nature into our environment by planting our balcony with the most beautiful flowers one can imagine, with various colors and during different seasons, we can plant trees where before there were ashes, we can let rivers come back and be flooded where we built a dam beforehand.

Again, naturing is a focused act of bringing more nature into our environment, the one for ourselves, the one for our apartment and environment, for our cities and for our world. It is this active and proactive act and doing that comes into place. And when we do that, we may - one day - say that we live in nature.

And we can imagine ourselves sitting on a meadow surrounded by a beautiful forest and building our house there which inside is full of flowers, trees and plants.

Friendships → befriending

What about friendships? We call each other friends. Some of us faster than others, some of us have different layers of friends, very good friends, good friends, acquaintances. Friendships change over time. With some people they are strong during high school and then they vanish to be lived up again in our late 60s, for others they emerge in our 40s and stay strong forever and for others they may be there all our life and then a moment, a situation happens and it disappears in the shadows.

Having friends is beautiful and one of the best things we can have. But how do we get friends? And how do we keep being friends?

Similar to the act of love, there is an act of friendship. We could even say that in the act of becoming friends, there may be an act of love involved, and some friendships are soo deep that they come very close to the act of loving someone. Here we are, at the level of depths of how we care for each other.

The verb of friendship can be said to be called befriending. But befriending is simply the act of entering an friendship. It is a mutual respect, interaction, doing something together, whatever it may have triggered the friendship to be entered, that allows it to enter. It is the proactive act of becoming friends with someone and allowing them into our inner circle of those people we want to see again, for one activity, one thought, one moment, one something, more than once in our life. They mean something to us and we care enough as to want to see them again. With a mutual understanding of becoming friends.

And then? The act of befriending as I have written down here is not enough. Friendship needs more than the simple act to befriend someone. It needs nurturing of the friendship. It needs caring and being there for each other over time. So that the friendship can stay a friendship.

It is as with a thought that comes into existence which we work on act upon through our thinking and then becoming a thinker through the act of thinking more than once.

With friendships, a friendship comes into existence through the act of befriending and we may call it a friendship, a starting friendship. But to call it a real friendship, it needs the act of befriending and working on the friendship, nurturing it from both parties over a prolonged time. Or one could say, the nurturing of the friendship needs to be done more than once, but several times so that because of those acts of being a friend to the other person, the friendship emerges.

The difference between the act of thinking and being a thinker lies in the need for a mutual interest and act of taking care of the other person, being there for the other person, supporting the other person in a friendship. A friendship cannot evolve if not both people are interested in being friends. Otherwise it is a one-sided friendship and to be honest, I do not believe we can call it a real friendship if only one person cares and supports, and wants to be friends with the the other person.

Thus, the big difference here lies in the act of thinking as an individual act, while the act of befriending and nurturing the friendship lies in a mutual community act. And both acts, both activities need to be „performed“ more than once, and over a considerable amount of time to be called ‚a thinker‘ or ‚a friendship‘.

What do these reflections of nouns and adverbs/ verbs show us?

Looking at words and concepts in the way of verbs and adverbs shapes and changes our perspective of how we interact with them.

It is like wanting to own material possessions like a house, a watch, brand fashion clothing. We may say, I want to have a love, a friendship, a partner, more nature around me, a house, I want to be a thinker.

When we want to have them, we are looking for them to come to us, we almost feel entitled and are in a position of „I want to have“. It is static, fixed. Like a possession, like something we can hold in our hands.

But when we think of acts, adverbs, and verbs, we switch our perspective to the doing and realise that to have things we need to act. To feel the moments, we need to be in the moment, to have friends, we need to befriend them and work on keeping the friendship, to love we need to be a loving person, we need to practice the act of loving another person.

And it shows us that life is fleeting. Not to scare us away, but to show us that moments are temporary, and friendships may vane simply because it needs two people that care for each other and like each other and do things together and nurture the friendship. Even though it may be a sad thought in itself, it can also be liberating. It shows us that it is on our acts of kindness and nuturing, of loving gestures, and naturing our environments that we can create what we care about. And that when one love or one friendship vanishes, then there will be new ones when we keep nurturing those friends we already have and when we befriend new people and nurture that friendship.

How the distraction of nouns and adverbs/verbs helps us to evaluate our life more sincerely and honestly

The distinction brings us into the act of doing something. And it allows us to more clearly evaluate our life and decide which acts and activities we want to foster to achieve what we care for.

When we say that we value friendships but do nothing to nurture our friendships or befriend new people, then we may say that we care for friendships but we may tell ourselves lies. If we can decide between being there for a friend and working and creative projects and we choose one of the latter two consistently over the first one, then over time, we may find ourselves with less friends than those who prioritised their actions differently.

And when we say, we want to be more in nature and feel nature around us, we may bring nature to our environment or we won‘t. But then, when we do not bring any nature to our environment, and we do not take any action to be more in nature and sitting in the green fresh grass surrounded by the forest, do we then really care for the nature? Or is it simply a thought that crossed our mind or a goal of someone else instead of our own being really caring for nature?

The difference between nouns and adverbs / verbs can also help us see deep seated fears and anxiety that we have within. Because what happens when we realize that friends are important to us but we fail to befriend new people out of fear of rejection? Or what if we long for a partner but are unable to show intimacy or do not know how to share our love and care for another person? Or what if we care for creation and being a creator, but fear showing our creations in public and selling them? Or what if we want to live in the moment and being in the momentary moment of actions, but realize that our mind is drifting away and we fail to simply be in the moment?

When we better understand what we value and objectively look at ourselves and how we act and what kind of actions we prioritise, we may realize that we do not prioritise those actions we care about, but not because we in reality have different values and do not really care about i.e. friendships, but that something within us, our fears, our anxiety, our lacking skills keep us from acting in the ways that we need to act to at some point call people friends, partners, colleagues and ourselves thinkers, writers or technologists and our values kindness, caring, and curiosity?

When we become aware of those things that hold us back, we can actively work on them. We can decide that we value friendships, but that we do not have too many friends, and thus we can say: „this month, I go to 4 events where I meet new people and then I come into contact with new people, and I look at who I like and then I am curious about them, I do something together with them, I care for them, and maybe, they also like me, and then we can become friends“. Or we can decide to nature our environment as we care for nature and we can say: „Tomorrow, when I am in the supermarket, next to it, there is a flower shop, I will pass by and buy a flower plant that I can put into my apartment and bring a bit of nature into my apartment and next weekend I have Sunday free and because I love nature, I will rent a car and drive into the nature and do a hike. And maybe one of the new people I befriended this week will want to join in for the hike and so we can do that together and I can combine my value for nature and friends.“

And then we can say: „I want to be a thinker, and for that I have all these ideas in my mind and I want to bring them down on paper and sort them and think about them. Sunday evening, after we have come back, I want to write down some of the thoughts I hade during the week and so I block 30 minutes of my time to do so shortly before going to bed.“

In that way, we can combine our values and take proactive steps to nurture those activities and things that we care for and that are important to us. And the more we do them and incorporate specific actions into our day-to-day, the more we will be able to say - I am thinker, I value friendships and have many good friends, I have a partner, I am a kind person, I am caring, I I love and nurture nature, I am a person that lives in the moment and is there and present with you in that moment, I am a creative person and a creator, I am a writer and author, I am a technologist and a marketer.

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I would love to hear you thoughts. Did you switch your perspective in that way before? What new insights did it bring you? How did it change the way you look at things? And what is the one word that you would love to switch from being a noun in your life to being an adverb/verb? The one you want to practice and work on and learn all about? So at one point in time, it becomes a noun for your life?