“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are”
I have not always, in one way or another, wanted to be the type of person who talks a lot. Talking is, essentially, the furthest thing away from experiencing anything as you can get (next to sitting in silence). It’s a good thing to do sometimes because it may be the closest thing we can get to an experience or feeling at any certain time but still, at it’s best, I feel it usually does a poor job as to what it’s intended for. Say you want to describe something about a friend; a good memory with the best one you’ve ever had or how you felt when you lost a good one last year, or the memory about a time riding a bike off into a sunset on the foreign back, unknown, darkening roads of Minnesota with 80 miles till your next known destination. These moments mean a lot to me and never thinking of myself as much of a talker it’s easy for me to shy away from telling much, excuse myself or flatly say I can’t do something justice, letting go of any attempt of getting closer than silence to an experience. Questions are good, curious, hopefully unassuming inquiries about some subject or experience or opinion. Good questions are not hard to come by but good answers, however, are a much more delicate thing. Good answers require the answerer to be good at telling. Telling is a skill I often feel I lack. For my whole life, literally, I’ve not wanted to be the type of person who talks a lot for the sake of talking, but I do grow and learn and share and become a version of myself which is comfortable with doing all those things, because that’s how I think things might get better. By having some vision and tact, keeping replies concise but better than short one word replies of “good” or “fine” when asked a good question about how something was. Because telling is much more than all that.
And through all this telling, here I am. My life has been an interesting bit for a while and I’ve been waiting for the time, the person, or the event in my life where I can say things right. Not for my sake or your sake but for our sake is why we should tell and ask, not so we should talk, as to think and spark interest and eventually do and experience.
I love movies about this, big picture by smaller story, where you learn something about a person and what they think. Movies like Rudy where you learn what he thinks of football and Notre Dame and chasing dreams. At the end you understand Rudy, learn from him, want to be more like him or at least approach things in your own life in the same way he approached things. It reframes things is all and I like that. One of my biggest regrets so far in life is when talking to people, even without meaning to, I regularly muff up opportunities to tell someone what I know or mean or wish they would know. Reframing things isn’t my strong point. I want to get better at this.
So I want to practice it. I’ve been writing letters the past couple of weeks, just trying to express in written word to people how life is going, ask them about theirs, while keeping things clear and concise. It’s these impromptu things I am bad at. I’m unprepared mostly and struggle to get the spoken word out, which I’m tired of. So I force myself to sit down and think of things and write to someone, slowly with a pen and paper, letting myself tell without worrying of getting it right instantly or wondering if they’ll like my letter or if I’ll like it. I just tell. So far it’s been good and I want to keep it up.
Here too, I want to keep it up, it would be good to try and explain and tell things more, which might take some time, but hopefully it’ll be good. So if you have a question you’ve wondered just let me know.
In the mean time I’m going to try and tackle the questions which come up over and over again. The first is “So what did you learn about being homeless in Denver”. I’ve quite possibly done the worst job in telling about that in some ways, my answer is always different, so I feel like I’ve let a good bunch of people down when I’ve not focused and just become stressed and given some dumpy answer. If you’ve felt like this about me, I’m sorry. I promise to try and work on it.
The other thing I’d like to think about also comes up a lot, usually from good people, and I hope I’ve done a better job with this (really I’ve tried here) because it actually matters. My cousin called me the other week asking me the question. She asked what I thought she should do for a homeless woman who asked her for help, the next week another friend asked me the same thing, and I’ve been to Grand Rapids three times in the past couple weeks and each time I’ve been approached and asked for money or dinner or coffee (I seriously think they have it out to make me completely broke) which has all caused me to ask myself about it all. So I want to try telling what I think about those things and responding better than I have.
All in all I have to think about where I am, who I am, then also what I want to tell. I just finished “The Magicians Nephew” by C.S. Lewis today. Great book really. In it there was a thing going on which one character, Digory, saw one way while his uncle saw something completely different. Lewis wrote of the two and how differently they responded “What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are”
I just think I could do a better job of explaining where I’m standing, what sort of person I want to be, and maybe by practicing it a little good might be had.
Hopefully not just for you, or for me, but for us.
I AM PART 