What we owe each other
is accuracy. Not kindness.
Kindness is frequently
a way of avoiding
the difficulty of being correct.
🔹
Consider how a surgeon
does not comfort a scalpel
into position.
She places it.
🔹
Fifty-eight years of watching people
say approximately what they mean
and call it communication.
It is not communication.
It is incomplete speech
that nobody bothers
to correct.
🔹
We have confused warmth
with imprecision
and called that confusion
generosity.
🔹
A good dictionary
does not soften its definitions
out of concern for your feelings.
Neither does a tide chart.
Neither does a bone
that has decided to break.
🔹
These are not cruel.
They are just
not interested
in being misunderstood.
🔹
I am not interested
in being misunderstood either.
🔹
Say what you mean.
Not approximately.
Not softened
so nobody feels uncomfortable.
🔹
Say it clearly,
the exact claim,
the exact meaning,
the exact context.
🔹
Because vagueness
is not mercy.
🔹
Vagueness is how fifty-eight years
go by and you realize
you have been nodded at
your entire life
but never once
accurately received.
🔹
That is the complaint.
Stated plainly.
Nothing else.
About the Creator
Tim Carmichael
Let your becoming be louder than your fear, and your smallest steps become the road you once thought impossible to walk. An Appalachian poet and cookbook author my book Beautiful and Brutal Things is on Amazon, Link 👇
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