237. Responding From Awareness

When I finish reading a provocative text, I might feel an urge to respond it with a text of my own. I want to communicate my response in words, just as the original text reached me through language. To do this, I interpret the text through the lens of my existing normative understanding and then I craft a new text that better fits with that understanding.

I might claim success if I construct a response so powerful that it logically defeats the argument of the original text. I might even feel a certain happiness in my ability to do this well. But by prioritizing my own text, I also cut myself off from the possibility of learning from the original text.

To learn, I would have to allow the text to operate on me, not merely as an instrument of language and reason, but as a record of human experience. I would have to investigate the experience the text describes and consider whether I might have experienced something similar. I would have to inquire into how the text could still be correct even when it contrasts so strongly with the truth according to my own normative understanding. I would have to question my understanding itself, to see if it really is as robust as it feels to me.

In doing these things, I’m still responding to the text, but I’m doing so through the lens of my awareness. Here, the text pushes my investigation of experience forward and facilitates the expansion of my awareness itself. It’s always possible that the text will not be helpful in this way. But even so, no written response from me is required.

If there is any value in a written response, it would be because the original text has consequences outside the world of language. It would need to have the power to meaningfully change something for myself or others. But even then, the necessary response will be far more powerful if it originates from a place of awareness.

To respond well is no easy matter. It requires patience, consideration, humility, and the courage to keep myself always open to experiences that differ from my own.