Tag Archives: life

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Words are Sticks and Stones

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Let’s compare two different sayings about speech. First, the ever popular, Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. And then this, lesser known one: “There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” That last one is from Solomon’s Proverbs. All the Proverbs are pretty good. You should read them, like now. Seriously. Stop wasting your time reading my blog, find a copy of Solomon’s Proverbs, and read them. And then come back if you want to.

All my life, I’ve been someone who is hurt by words. I’m hurt by words even when people have no intention of hurting me with words. And for a long time, I thought that made me weak. I never had a broken bone from either sticks or stones, but words always hurt me. People would always tell me that I should stop caring what other people thought about me, as if it was a disease. And if I just took the cure of not caring, I would become a healthier person.

And so I learned how to use sarcasm. People were sarcastic with me, and I was sarcastic back because I thought that was what was expected of me. Sarcasm drifted into all of my relationships. My romantic relationships, my relationship with my brother, my relationships with my parents, my friends, my acquaintances. But I wasn’t all that good at sarcasm. If sarcasm was an actual language (like some people say it is), I was nowhere near fluent so a lot of times I would just give up and be sincere with people. And that’s where you start to get into trouble. Because when you are sincere with people, human nature is to start expecting people to be sincere with you. (My psych professor tells me that is why Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud stopped being friends – Jung was mad that Freud wouldn’t open up to him.)

The verse from Proverbs is always reentering my life. I think about it a lot. Because the truth is that words hurt. And they hurt everyone. Not just me. It took me a long time to figure that out because people don’t like showing that they are hurt by words, but they are. I think the first relationship where I eradicated sarcasm fully was with my brother. It took time, and it was hard at times, but my brother and I hardly ever are sarcastic with each other now, and it’s brought us really close. It’s amazing how deep a relationship can go when you are honest about how much you care about each other and what you like and dislike about each other without the veil of sarcasm.

The horrible thing about sarcasm is that once you start, you think it’s a way of life, that it’s natural. And so even when you are conscious about it, it pops up every once in a while and stabs people you care about. I stab my parents with sarcasm all the time. And I hate that.

A very close friend and I communicate almost solely through sarcasm. And it’s horrible because it escalates and escalates until one of us says something that is really hurtful, and then it feels like we may not be able to talk to each other anymore. I recently admitted to her that I can’t communicate in that way anymore, that it hurts me and that I know it hurts her. And it was hard because I felt like I was being weak. But it seems silly to choose to live in the range of swords when you can be in a peaceful meadow instead.

I know it’s going to be tempting to say something sarcastic in response to this post. But I challenge you to actually think about it, and to respond sincerely.

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Leadership as Servitude

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As I’ve mentioned once before, I help with a Writer’s Workshop for middle school students. It’s rewarding work. And I am blessed to be able to work with these young people so often. This past Friday we were finishing up our acrostic name poems. We work with them in the school’s library. The volunteers are waiting for the students as they come in and so we watch them group off to the several library tables. Most of the time, this is done down strict gender lines. This Friday was no different. The girls giggled into their respective corners. And the guys guffawed into theirs.

I like to change up who I work with so I can start to get a feel for tailoring instruction methods to different groups of students. This week, I targeted the boys’ table full of the class clowns. Two of them weren’t even finished with the rough drafts of their acrostics. The third was rather above and beyond where he needed to be. I sat down and introduced myself and then waited. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything out of these kids if I tried to force feed it. So I sat there and watched how they interacted, trying to catch on to their inside jokes and get a feel for their slang and junior high jargon.

After a couple of minutes, I had a rough sketch of how they interacted as a group, what made them tick as individuals and what was holding them back, and then I started instructing. Boy number one, the most creative of the group, was held back by his need to be the class clown, which he mostly achieved by self-deprecating humor. I know how that is. But when I showed him that his poetry could involve things like noises or slang, he immediately took a new liking to it.

Boy number two was mainly held back by his lack of will. All he needed was a few reminders to keep working, and he was fine. Boy number three needed someone to buffer the disruptions from the other two or else he got distracted.

As I have more interactions with people in which I am in some kind of position of authority, I am becoming more and more convinced that I cannot help them unless I actively work against the formality of that position. Leadership as servitude is a very powerful thing.

I’m interested; do you find that it is easier to lead when you are attempting to serve others?

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The Perversity of Human Capital and Anglo-Saxons

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A while back I traded in my romantic pen, beard, and large red glasses for G-mail, sweaters, and contacts. I decided I spent too much time lamenting about the world and not enough time fixing it. And for the most part, I was happy with this change until I realized that I had started to use terms like “human capital.” “Human capital” is a term people use in all sorts of official business type things – corporations, marketing, nonprofit work, public policy, and government.  The unfortunate part about terms like “human capital” is that no matter how much you disapprove of such terms, they invariably show up in your vocabulary if you spend enough time in official business type things.

And so I was at a meeting on Thursday, and the words kind of tumbled out of my mouth without even thinking about it. “What we have here is a human capital problem.” And then I cringed. Human capital seems like it should be an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp or cheap college or something like that. Humans are not capital. They are people. Individual people.

In my Medieval English Literature class right now we are learning about the Anglo-Saxons as we read Beowulf. In Anglo-Saxon law, everything had a price. Your nose was cut off in an argument? Six shillings to you from the perpetrator! Even your life was given a price. The Old English word for this price is “weregild,” literally “man price.” My friend very insight-fully asked in discussion whether we still have a concept of weregild. Initially, I thought no. We are popularly taught that human life is invaluable. When someone is murdered now, the murderer doesn’t pay the victim’s family; they are locked up to protect the rest of society. It seemed obvious that we have evolved beyond weregild.

But then, what exactly is “human capital?” Isn’t weregild really what we are talking about when we talk about “human capital?” Sure, we would never say that one man is financially more valuable than another, but we do say that one man is more valuable than another. That is the whole problem of human capital. It assumes that there is a group of people out there that your organization needs that your organization can’t have and that the way to get ahead is to find and woo that group. This is horrible thinking. Everyone brings value to a project. If you have a group of people who are intensely passionate about your organization, you should find a way to use their talents to help you. Figure out how to plug them in and watch as creativity begins to overflow.

My friend from class said that we might as well walk around with dollar values tattooed on our foreheads. At least that way we would know where we stood. I’m afraid she might be right.