“She has something to say,” used to be a thing people said to say worth listening to. A high recommendation coming from my favorite English professor, the poet and critic Cal Bedient. But at the time, in my mid-twenties, I didn’t know what I had to say yet. So the compliment was also a challenge.
I hadn’t even remembered key parts of my childhood yet. I had been a libertarian the semester after reading JS Mills and Peace & Freedom party member the next semester, after a brush up with Marx; clearly my politics were still a bit uncertain, too. Downright break-neck.
By grad school, I was a little more clear. I offended my Objective Journalism-ist friend by saying I was “a pacifist, environmentalist, and feminist.” He scoffed: “at least you know who you are.” I didn’t scoff back, but I always wondered about people who think they don’t have opinions. Where are they in there?
Years later, I’m finally getting around to pursuing true mindfulness: to be able to have a thought and not have an opinion about it, to not judge unless truly called for. “Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.”
So many sayings later, what is there left to say about what I have to say?
My daughters’ dad, composer and multimedia artist Todd Winkler used to say, “talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” Maybe it’s also true about talking about words.
Still, I have been known to dance about architecture.
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