One of the reasons I love doing the work I do is that it provides me more opportunities to say the right words to the right person at the right time.
Sometimes those words are delivered via a book or essay, sometimes in a podcast or as part of a public presentation. Sometimes they arrive via email—maybe in a newsletter, maybe in a response to a quick hello or a question about something.
And sometimes those right words contain implicit or explicit permission to do something they were feeling conflicted or concerned about. Other times they’re encouragement (which can accomplish the same) or reaffirmation; maybe a bit of knowledge, or a point of view that unlocks a new perspective that—because of where they are in life, what they’ve been thinking about, who they’ve grown into as a person—suddenly changes everything.
I’ve been the beneficiary of such words many times over the years, and almost always they’ve been meaningful primarily to me: they hit me the way they did because of where I was, what I was thinking about, and where I was headed (or was considering going) next; the words I received were circumstantially revelatory, not inherently so.
A friend recently told me, for instance, that he thought I should write more fiction.
I wrote a few series and short-story collections a long time ago, but I’ve entirely refocused on nonfiction work in recent years, and haven’t consciously considered writing any new fiction for a long time.
After he said that, though, I realized I had a concept for a novel (maybe a series?) jostling around in the back of my brain. In the weeks since, that concept has seemed to keep bubbling up, demanding attention.
I jotted down gobs of notes on my recent flights to and from Seattle, tightening-up a lot of vague concepts and narrative paths, and sorting out what the point of the whole endeavor might be.
I didn’t even realize this idea was there, but that single sentence (embedded in a conversation about other things) flagged, excavated, and forced me to pay attention to it.
We live in a world of immense communicatory potency, all of us wielding godlike powers that allow us to broadcast our words to a substantial portion of the total, global human population.
The channels that empower us are flooded with other messaging and media, too, so our capacity to break through is limited not just by the resonance (or lack thereof) between what we say and those who receive our transmissions, but also by all the noise (and our increasing, collective aversion to that noise).
All of us have keys that might benefit someone else, though, unlocking and nudging (or whole-body-shoving) them in a direction they may never have considered before we said what we said.
A few uttered syllables can change the course of someone else’s life, can make them feel something they needed to feel to confidently face an imposing challenge; our words can spark an enthusiasm that would have otherwise remained buried, unrecognized, or untended.
This also means we have the opportunity to do the opposite, though: our words serving as malevolent incantations that hinder rather than help, encumber rather than elevate.
The right words in the right ears at the right time can make all the difference in the world, but the wrong words can, too, and the difference they make might be substantially less beneficial for that recipient, and maybe even (ultimately) for the world.
The stakes of this are seldom that high, as most of what we say will be lost in the noise that garbles our technological connective tissue.
But when we do happen to puncture that hubbub, what we say and how we say it can be vital, even if just to one other person, and even if only in non-obvious (to us) ways.