Some Challenges of the Spoken Word

People say things, right? Isn’t that how people are supposed to interact, by speaking mouth-words? That’s the impression I get, anyway. And apparently one is expected to respond relatively quickly, without taking too much time to process. Conversations should be slower things, I think. Is it alright to say things that don’t necessarily need saying?

When I’m quiet, I do have things in my mind. Things I could say, I suppose; things I could make into words and push off of my tongue for other people to hear. But I ask certain questions of myself before saying things. Like Who Cares? Is what I am about to say genuinely relevant to the conversation and its participants? Will it make someone think? Will it make someone laugh? If the answer to all of those questions is “no”, my lips often refuse to move. But I’m never quite sure if that is the right decision, because I tend to experience many awkward silences and I can’t help but think that it’s my fault for not filling up the space with words.

On lugubrious days
I get the impression
That others may notice
My verbal recession.

Sometimes on desperate impulse I will regurgitate some vaguely-related phrase from my mind, whatever is floating closest to my mouth. How very spastic I must seem, stretches of silence awkwardly punctuated with puzzling interjections and broken responses. Then sometimes there is nothing floating nearby and I feel a solid white space behind my eyes, a catch in my throat.

I need to make
More words with my mouth,
Build them on my tongue
And then push them out.

I suppose it doesn’t matter very much anyway; everything I have to say has been said before, if not by me then by someone else. Any concept my little brain could possibly conceive has surely already been thoroughly wrung out by minds brighter than my own. Why bother saying what has been heard before? I’m only twenty-three; I don’t think I’ve lived long enough to say new things, or even to know very much about old things. Why bother saying something that is not new, or that is essentially unproductive?

Sometimes I feel like a ineffectual robot: inexpressive due to lack of data, then randomly activating in sudden bursts of short-circuiting gibberish. Hell-o. Would. You. Like. To. Con-verse? Yest-er-day. I. Ate. Straw-berr-ies. Do. You. Like. Straw-berr-ies? Data: Straw-berr-ies. Carry. Their. Seeds. On. The. Out-side. This. Has. Been. A. Pleas-ant. Con-ver-sat-ion. That. Ful-filled. Social. Re-quire-ments. Good. Bye.

I think I am better at the letter-format of communication, when I am able to contemplate my words. To edit them, to see them somewhere other than my head-space before they are announced. I make more sense that way.
Why do you think I write so much?

I pronounce to the world
Some stuttering sounds.
They look at me strangely;
I’ll just write it down.


.

The Classic Question has No Answer

Sometimes I see people living their lives and I think, “Wait a minute, that was the life I was supposed to live. I was supposed to do that. That was my thing.” I watch people have the strength and energy, the supple joints and clear mind to do the things that I’ve dreamed of doing my whole life. Things that I am too tired for these days. I watch the world go by me, many people them with their strings of accomplishments that I had hoped to achieve; their experiences I’d dreamed of having. As I am left behind I think about wormholes, and alternate realities. A universe where things went the way I planned. Because, if those theories are true and the alternate universes are infinite, surely there is one where things unfolded the way I would have chosen.

Maybe there’s one where things are even better, but there’s probably one where things are much worse. I wouldn’t gamble for a different life, but at times pesky lupus things make me lose count of my blessings. And there are so many of them—blessings, that is—in spite of the negatives.

I have been to Kenya and visited one of the largest slums in the world, walking in the midst of some of the deepest poverty imaginable. Right here in Kansas I’ve carried an abused child on my hip, and played Pokemon cards and dinosaurs with another. I’ve been friends with people forced to bury their parents far too young, and with people who were raised in a world of drugs and violence.

Relatively my life is oh so very, very good.

Yet, sometimes...What if I were healthy…?

If I were a rich man, deedle-deedle-didle-deedle-deedle-dum…Would it spoil some vast eternal plan?

Would it? Of course in the midst of my own pain I have asked the classic question, “why?”. I have asked it all the more desperately on behalf of those I’ve met whose suffering is far beyond my own.

Of course we all wish we could look into the future, to see “why” we have had to endure particular things. Except, I don’t really believe in that “why”.

I don’t mean that it’s just hard to believe; I mean I really don’t believe there is always a reason for things. Sometimes there is, maybe. But in most cases, I think, bad things just happen. I believe that God will indeed work everything out for ultimate good, but He is working with a world that is already broken, and full of broken people. I don’t believe that He broke us for some divine “reason”. I don’t believe He inflicts suffering on us based on His own agenda. I believe He is in the Emergency Room of Souls, working tirelessly to heal us as the hurts come. We stumble in bleeding pain and loss from some sudden blow, and He gives us the stitches that keep us from falling apart. Then He connects us to communities with people to help and support us, and helps design our lives for their greatest possible capacity of joy while we wait for eternity.

I don’t know; I’m no expert on God or theology. I’m not even a ministry major in college. But I have had a lot of time and several reasons to dig for answers, scratching desperately at the questions until blood seeps from under my fingernails. I have thought, and I have reached a few conclusions in my own mind. And one of them is this: The Classic Question has no definitive Answer; only a Healer.