Just Thinking More_XI

More 'Just Thinking' Pieces

Anchor 1

Incredibe

Announcing A Death

It’s been a 40-year slaughter, but this beautiful word is now dead. It lies on the floor of our vocabularies, hacked to pieces.

I remember the early days of this massacre. Or rather my first awareness of it, of my participation in it, actually. I was in a meeting, and when I used the word, the director rebuked me for using it, saying that what I was describing was not incredible at all, that it was, if anything, quite believable, which made it so dangerous. It was a rough reproach, but I felt grateful a few hours later.

And I’ve been listening ever since. I’ve been careful with my use of the word. But I’ve also been keeping an ear out for others’ misuse of it, seeking company in my humiliation, I guess.

And they have been there, misuse after misuse – everywhere. Eventually I could not keep track of the hackings. “Incredible this,” “incredible that.” People seemed unable to find a single other word for whatever they found unusual or implausible or shocking or dazzling or staggering or unthinkable or half-baked or stunning or gorgeous or outlandish or or or or. Everything was “incredible.”

Last week I had had it. Some of the finest minds in journalism, including Rory Stewart, used it multiple times in one brief interview, and that was it for me. I had to write about it. I had to protest. I had to do something! So here I am.

And here you are. Might we do something together? Might we follow the three-part directive for change: 1) stop, 2) breathe, 3) act? Could at least you and I 1) never say “incredible” again unless the thing we are describing truly cannot be fathomed by the human mind? Can we just otherwise stop saying the word?

Then can we 2) take a breath and think about this winsome word. Can we gaze at its etymology and breathe some more?

Then 3) can we act? Can we use “incredible” only to describe things like the 93-billion-mile diameter of the universe, or the “zero-size” of a quark, or the sudden emergence from a two-year coma, or the way a smile changes a whole day, or the voice after death of someone we love? But otherwise, could we leave the word, this most meritorious and meticulous word, alone?

Because maybe it is not dead. Maybe it is just waiting for the Prince of Moderation to blow a kiss and put the pieces back together. Maybe one day it can stand before us again in all its golden glory. Maybe we can actually mean it when we say it.

Isn’t that the least we can ask of ourselves, the only word-gifted sentient beings on earth?

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Anchor 2

PRAETERITIO

“I Pass Over the Fact”

I have used that rhetorical device, Cicero’s favourite, before. I wasn’t going to use it again. But. It is the only way to let myself condemn. I am not usually a judger.

So, I will not say that I am sad. I won’t tell you that I wail, out of ear shot, at mendacity’s madman (for surely he/it is, or else what is sanity?). And that I wash my face and try again to get through the day without the sadness. I should rail. But I don’t. I weep.

I will not tell you that my sadness bears embarrassment for my beloved country, 5,000 miles away.

I will not say to you that I am incredulous, even though I predicted it all. I knew that America in just enough states was not ready for a Black female president. And yes, I know that incumbents of any race and gender are doomed, and she was that, too. But mostly I knew that Black/female would never, not yet, win in America. And so at first I stiffened and kept my eyes, like a sentry of sense, on the passing of one day and then another, noting at one point that we had only 1,450 days to go. Then only 1,431. Then.… I stopped. The cruelty drowned out the counting.

I know I should be sad about the cause, not about the calamitous creature that is the effect. And I am. I revile the features of our systems that alienate, oppress, exclude, denigrate honest labor and exalt unearned earning. I also loathe that the entirely justified rage leads almost axiomatically to an unjustified raising up of a base bully to believe in. I also understand that just enough single-issue voters voted against abortion, or immigration, or trans people in sports, or this thing or that thing, regardless of the massive and predictable consequences for the country at large. Many, nearly most, did not vote expressly for a vapid vindicator as raptor in chief. I know that.

So I will not tell you that all of that saddens me because there is no rapture in being right about wrong.

That is all. I just wanted to let you know that I pass over the fact that I am very, very sad.

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Anchor 3

First Laugh Last

A Principle of Good Conversation

You are telling a story. You think it is funny. So you laugh as you tell it. What could possibly be wrong with that?

You laughed first.

In effect you said, "I think this is funny, and you must agree with me and laugh, too. If you don’t, you will embarrass me."

I find this dynamic intriguing because if you had said it was funny but not laughed, my silence would not embarrass you. But your laughter takes me prisoner. It deposits me between your reaction and my own.

Here’s the point. In good conversation there are two parties: the talker and the responder. Both parties are equal. The talker generates content; the responder reacts to content. But when the talkers suddenly become their own responders, they turn the real responders into a mirror of the themselves. Abruptly there is only one person in the conversation.

To be on the receiving end of that highjacking can be agony, at least for me. While you are laughing at your own comment, I have to decide in a flash whether I think it is funny, and if I don’t, whether to humour you by laughing, too; or to stay quiet and let you stew in this reciprocity abyss.

Recently I agreed to spend a day with a long-time friend, but by 2pm I had had it. I just couldn’t take any more of her predictable laughter at her own stories. She often even guffawed at what she had just said, drawing in a great loud wad of breath. And each time, I dangled in the unseemly gulf she exhaled while she laughed.

So I long for a time when talkers stop being responders, particularly first-laughers. Surely it can’t be that hard for talkers to say something and let the responders decide whether it is funny.

But I have no idea how to make that change. I don’t seem to have whatever it takes to point out this habit to people. But I guess we could all take a look at ourselves. When we are the talker, we could, the second we start laughing, notice whether the responder laughed first. If they didn’t, if we were the first-laughers, we could stop laughing right that second. And after about eight times of catching ourselves, or maybe twenty, we might stop it before it happens. And maybe after twenty times of preempting it, we would be cured. We will have become good conversationalists.

Of course, it is possible that right now you are scratching your head. Maybe you have never encountered first-laughers. Maybe there are only four of them in the world, the ones in my life. But I doubt it.

There is precedent for my concern. Similar advice free-floats in every culture: “Don’t laugh at your own jokes." That maxim recognises something similar. But I would argue that “Don’t laugh first” is in a league of its own.

So I will go ahead and publish this little piece. Just in case.

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Anchor 4

Interest

Not Curiosity

Of course curiosity is good. It brought us to almost all of the splendid places we are today.

Pragmatically, it was curiosity that led to the device you are using to read this. And to the light on your desk, the bike on your porch, the shoes on your feet, the paint on your walls, the aid in your ear, and the food in your belly. In fact, almost nothing in our everyday lives came about naturally; it all emerged from human inventions mothered by curiosity.

Ethereally, curiosity led to the music you love, the voice of a child who survived after all, the canvas and paints that gave us Monet and Pollock, the satin around the ankles of Misty Copeland. All of it from curiosity.

“What if we tried this?” we asked. “How about we add one more and see what happens?” “What else could we do with that?” “What really happened there?” “Do you see that? What do you think it is?” “What could they have meant by that?” “Why did that work?” “Who else might have been involved?” “Can we be sure of this?” “Then what?”

Curiosity. Focused, self-driven, determined. Most likely a uniquely human attribute, its progeny essential to every dimension of our lives.

Except one. Exceptional independent thinking. The fruit of generative listening. That requires interest. Not curiosity. When it comes to generating the highest quality of thinking, there is a fine-as-gossamer distinction between interest and curiosity.

Interest in where the thinker will go next in their thinking is different from curiosity about that. Interest has no agenda; it is content to focus on the thinker. Interest, therefore, is full of ease. It is open, welcoming, invitational, uninvested in the final destination. It does not long to steer; it longs only to be, and through its being catalyse daring, crisp, consequential, well-reasoned, deeply-felt, sky-high and quark-deep consideration. That’s it. In that way interest is selfless.

Curiosity, on the other hand, is self-driven. The second I become curious about where you will go next, I have begun to want you to go somewhere specific. I have latched on to something. I have sharpened my teeth and begun to smile a bit strangely and to nod more often, at all the things you say that align with my curiosity. I have begun to intrude.

You can sense that I have done this. But it is just a bit too subtle, too nuanced, for you to call it out. So you continue, noticing a qualitative change in the whole experience, but gaining something good from it nonetheless. And so it continues. Interest inevitably turns into curiosity every time we meet to think.

The creeping take over of curiosity is slithery in our listening relationships. Even the idioms contain the differences: “interested in” vs. “curious about.” One is “inside” with the thinker, the other is “outside” with the self. When interest starts to morph into curiosity, the quality of the listening diminishes, gradually but inevitably.

Skip Steward, leader in the improvement movement of American healthcare said it well, “Curiosity is a disguised form of telling." 1 I agree. In all arenas of listening, particularly professional ones such as executive and personal coaching, “telling” is regarded as blunder. Discovery by the client is seen as success. And yet, as Skip has noticed, listening from curiosity, rather than from interest, is the blunder in insidious force.

So we have much to gain from internalising this exquisite distinction between interest and curiosity. If we can shake ourselves free of the societally-championed habit of becoming curious, so imbedded it feels like marrow, and settle back supplely into interest, the human being thinking in front of us will have a chance to embark and stay on a remarkable journey of their own never-before-generated thoughts, leading often to better-than-they-could-imagine changes in their lives.

1 Skip Steward, Vice President and Chief Improvement Officer, Baptist Memorial Health Care, Memphis, Tennessee. Podcast host “Connecting the Dots”: https://www.baptistonline.org/physician-resources/connecting-the-dots-podcast/episodes