Parenting holds many lessons, and one I learned recently involved a routine event: Tucking a child into bed. As I was trying to get one of my children to sleep—one who most certainly did not want to end the day—I was asked a question: Why do you love me?
I knew my child was buying time, but the question opened me up to a realization. As a busy parent, it is often too easy to slip into a role that has the power to deaden one’s language and one’s responsiveness to life.
Here is what I mean. The role of dutiful father can—at times—turn one into a cliché. You say the right things, but you stop thinking about whether or not you mean them, or what it would even mean to mean them. Before you dismiss this as too much over-thinking, check-in with how you use language.
If your child asked you to move out of the generic role of father, who kisses the forehead and closes the door with—Sleep well, I love you—would you be able to immediately put into words the specific love you feel for your child? Do you have a language that expresses what makes that child utterly precious and unlike any other person in the world?
As I sat momentarily stunned by my child’s question, I realized how automatic life can become and how detrimental a life can be if lived as if one were only role and not also a person full of life.
Leo Tolstoy dramatizes this feeling in his powerful novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Summarized simply, this story revolves around a man realizing—on his death bed—that he never lived. He went through the motions—dutifully, even successfully—but he never took the time to discover the meaning of the gift of his specific and utterly unique life.
My daughter’s question stopped me short and caused me to think through the damages we can do by using our language thoughtlessly.
In addition to being a father of four, I am also a teacher, and I see my students—women and men—struggling with the language that is available to them. Instead of cultivating their unique gifts, they try to live up to their interpretation of the standards of our society and punish themselves if they feel they don’t fit into some generic role. And, one reason they do this is because they are inheriting a language that is not rich enough to do them justice.
If a young man isn’t overly interested in sex, why do we need to judge and rush to affix a label to him? If a young woman enjoys sex, why do we need to judge and rush to affix a label to her? Instead of hemming people in with a dead and deadening language, what would it mean to try a bit harder to see people in their specificity?
Our politics doesn’t help. If you voted for Donald Trump, is racist the best word to describe you? If you are critical of Donald Trump, is triggered the best word to describe you?
Aren’t we all more than that?
It is important to think about whether or not the language we use makes us more or less alive to the reality in front of us. Politicians and the media are more than happy to give us a language that works in their best interests, but is it in our interest to write off the complexity that each one of us is in return for a one-liner?
Before dismissing this line of thinking as naïve, think about your automatic responses to the situations you face in life. When a woman does something that frustrates you, what language do you use? When someone of a different party does something you disagree with, what language do you use? Do you find yourself playing out some role, or do you feel yourself fully alive as the person you hope to be?
Being alive to our specificity and the specificity of others isn’t easy, but if Leo Tolstoy is correct, we live and die in our specificity. We don’t want to be on our deathbed—like Ivan Ilyich—and only then realize we wished we didn’t play a role but lived a life. If the role of father you play keeps you from loving your children in the ways you want to love them, fight to find the words. If the role you play in your politics causes you to say things you don’t mean, have the courage to speak in a way that does justice to who you are.
Not that this will be easy, and it will be almost impossible if our diet is soundbites. If we are worried about our relationship to our language, there is nothing better than picking up someone like Tolstoy and opening ourselves up to the possibility that we are living a generic life that damages people around us and—ultimately—is unworthy of the gift of life.
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