More Than Words
As parents, we can talk our kids to death, and what happens when we do that? They tune out. Actually, it's not just kids that do that, people in general tend to "tune out" when anyone talks and talks and talks.
What is behind all that talking? A couple of things. First, a certain pressure inside oneself that a person doesn't know what to do with. Second, a certain self-centeredness.
Life is so much more than words.
Have you ever tried not speaking when something in you wants to speak? Have you ever just quietly been there with your child wherein you simply listen to them and let them speak and share their life with you? Have you ever experienced the joy in their struggle to communicate something to you? It is quite beautiful indeed when we agree to enter into a place of being that is "more than words."
This world is so caught up in intellectual dialogue that it misses the entire point behind and beyond words. There is so much emphasis on children's intellectual learning, but what good is any intellectual learning if one doesn't understand how to feel, how to truly feel what is behind and beyond words?
Because until a child (or any of us) understands how to truly feel beyond words, all we can do in any given moment when others are in need, is to respond from an intellectual center. Intellectual responses have no feeling behind them because they are "learned" and not felt in the moment. Intellectual responses can't feel another's pain in the moment. It is pain that acts out and spews things that are unpleasant toward another and if one isn't feeling that pain when it is spewed and directed at them, the only response to that pain will be an intellectual one - from the same pain nature. The response won't be one of compassion and understanding.
It would be nice if learning how to feel could be taught in schools, but it can't. One has to learn it for themselves by honestly seeing just how uncompassionate and inconsiderate our natures really are. We have to see how we put so much value on the intellect yet rarely anything on the interior work on ourselves.
It's all upside down, and it's all more than words.
Photo by Vinit Vispute on Unsplash
