Clarity for Teachers: Day 27
‘It’s easier to be clear in what you say if you only say what is needed.’
So how do you know what is needed?
Words have always been my thing, the material I took to as a child, surprising teachers with improbable vocabulary. When I was seven, they tested our reading ages. Our teacher that year was Mrs Maize. I remember coming up to her desk in the Portacabin classroom, reading each word as she pointed at it, right the way to the end of the test. That meant I had a reading age of twelve, a fact of which I was immensely proud.
You can tie yourself in knots with words, you can hide behind them, you can use them to cut other people down. You can fool people, you can fool yourself, you can make a fool of yourself, you can make yourself look clever. There are a hundred ways that words will do you in, and a gift for words is going to take you through some or all of these, before it ends up leading to anything like clarity.
I think of the overflow of words that I’d hear coming out of my mouth in certain situations in my teens through to my mid-twenties. Language born out of unfocused need, a gift without an address to which to deliver it. I can still catch myself filling in with fluency, though now I know this as a sign that something is astray.
There’s a way of taking today’s advice that says, you hold that thing you were about to say, and you ask whether you really need to say it. The trouble is, language doesn’t always work like that: the words don’t take shape in the mind, then get delivered ready-made to the mouth. Much of the time, I don’t exactly know what I’m going to say until I hear it coming out.
But I can still steer by the logic of need, and it seems there are two sides to this. The one is to notice which of my own needs might be making me unclear: what else is going on, what unsatisfied desire or sense of entitlement is getting in the way? The other is to quieten down, to wait, to be still enough that I can feel the subtle tug of what is needed. This is the pull of something beyond my own needs, desires and entitlements, something larger or deeper.
The other day, I got a message from another writer, wrestling with a strange sense of not being able to write. ‘I think it’s because writing doesn’t matter deeply enough,’ he wrote. ‘It’s not the thing that matters deeply.’
I’ve known writers who were in love with words and their clever possibilities, but the ones I trust know that writing is not the thing that matters deeply, only one way among others by which we sometimes encounter that thing. However good we are with words, they can neither capture the world nor allow us to escape it. Sometimes, on a clear day, they can be a way of taking part in the world, belonging to it and entering into the endless play of it all — listening for what is needed, the way you might as a musician taking part in an almighty jam session.
Västerås, 8 April, 2020
This is the twenty-seventh in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
