Getting right speech right

I’m pretty sure I waxed rhapsodic in my graduate school essay about the importance of telling people’s stories. Stories were the one thing in the world that always made sense to me, even helped me make sense out of all the other things that didn’t. I don’t know when exactly it happened, but I’ve left that church. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad if I write a story that shows someone something they didn’t know, or offers them a way of seeing something they might not have thought of.

But I think the real reason what people in my profession do matters, if it does at all, is not because of what we say. It’s because of how we listen.

I sent my whopping three-part piece to my editor today. I’ve never felt quite so awesome before; course I’ve never had to write anything for publication quite so long before (O languishing unpublished master’s thesis, how I regret thee). I always feel a burst of general amazingness when I finish something and it seems to have worked. It’s the kind of feeling I imagine David Ortiz has when the bat connects with the ball just right and he can haul his large self around the bases at a pace he chooses. I stress imagine: I have rarely connected a bat with a ball, not even when I’m putting them away in the Kramers’ garage.

The corollary, of course, is that when I finish something that feels less than that awesome, I get agitated and moody and consumed with thoughts of doing PR.

The thing is (sorry, Beetdown!), I never feel this good. I’d like to say it’s because maybe I did justice to the dozens of voices I’ve been carrying around in my head for weeks, or because maybe it will make some difference for peace or love or happiness in the world that I’ve managed to get those voices on paper.

Turns out none of that crap that led me to journalism is true. I’m just relieved that they are there, the people who embody those voices. That they exist; that I met them; that they shared with me, and that I tried, in the exercise that is writing, to understand what they were telling me. I’m relieved that understanding takes writing, takes exorcism, because otherwise those voices are only inside of me. That seems unfair to them, and to be honest, it’s not that easy for me. There’s so many of them, and they’re so sad.

There’s a fascinating genius of a guy named Doug McGill who has all sorts of ideas worth thinking about, even if you’re not a writer–check him out here–but one that sticks with me, as a journalist, is his determination to use “right speech” (a la the Buddhists) in his work.

I’m not a Buddhist; I don’t know about paths and enlightenment and those things. And I disagree that “speech is a person’s very first chance to act morally in the world.” I think listening–active presence–is the first shot we get. I think it’s the hardest thing to do well. Speech is simply our chance to do something just with what we have gained.

I don’t think my articles are any kind of “justice”; I don’t think they do all those things that journalists talk about at conferences: I think our impression of ourselves as “giving voice to the voiceless” or “comforting the afflicted” or “protecting the vulnerable” is probably pretty arrogant. But more than that, it seems to me irrelevant.

The people I met in remote Sierra Leone will never see what I write. The only thing I can do for them is what can be done in the time we spend together; the only thing I can do for them is listen, and then try to do the best thing I know how with what I have heard.

Which, by extension, is the only thing you can do, too. So maybe in the end that right speech is a little more relevant than I thought.

But you get the idea. And you’ll have a chance to practice, and to judge my own practice; I’ll link to my series when it runs.