Is it true that a pen is sharper than a sword ? If we think about mega-battle in ancient time ago, of course, sword is the best weapon to kill enemies. But, if we curious about, what happened behind the battle, we can find that a pen has important matter in this issue. How come ? Well, a couple weeks ago, I’ve just watch several Mandarin movies such as Three Kingdom Ressurrection (Andi Lau) and The Batle of Red Cliff (Takeshi Kaneshiro). Both of them has same stories background at the age of Romance Three Kingdom. One of the interesting character from these story is Zhuge Liang. Who is Zhuge Liang ? He was a military advisor for Shu Dinasty, which Liu Bei as the ruler. He can’t fight as well as his Generals, but he can control his king and his armies. He just use his ability in weather forecast, poetry, and chess to encounter Cao Cao invasion. He was so expertise in writing as well as in diplomatic. I can say, Zhuge Liang is prefer use his pen rather than hi sword.
So, what is relationship of a pen and a sword. In my humble opinion, a pen is related with ethics, manners, and our words. And a sword usually related with fight or confrontation. Somehow, a pen can control a sword, like Zhuge Liang did. Want an example again ? A couple days ago, I saw my friends fought each other, just because of miss-understanding in email forum. Okay, let say both of them has initaial X and Y. In email, X ask Y to help our batch in some particular donation. X sent Y a letter with harsh words, eventhough he didn’t meant that. Why he did that ? Because X wrote it in jokes languages, but he forgot that Y has same character with him, hard-hearted and temperamental character. Of course, Y didn’t accept X words and replied it with anger words too. X and Y involved in a small confrontation (which symbolic with a sword) because of a couple words (symbolic by pen).
We can predict how depth an ocean, but we can’t predict an human heart. A sentences have no expresion, therefore it has a lot of perception between peoples in the world. That’s why, we need some ability to control our words, so that people can understand us and they not get anger. This is about the manner and the ethic to write something. It looks like difficult, but it has possibility to overcome it. In Indonesian’s proverb, we usually say “..Your tongue is your tiger..”, and nowadays, perhaps we can change these proverb with “..Your words and your tongue are your tiger..”. So my friends, before you say or write something, think first, and select your word, because a pen is sharper than a sword.. =)
Aldi Paris 