Here's another element of Yang Time that I'm coming to terms with: sending words out into the world again, where they may influence others. (Or they may not even be read--and I'm OK with that!)
For the past year, I haven't actively sought paying work. My semi-retirement started when my father became ill. Since his death, paperwork has multiplied in stacks on my desk(s) the way wire coat hangers breed in the dark of the closet. We as a family are sorting our way through to the bottom of it, though.
It's been a full year, "full" both in the sense of "more than 365 days" and "eventful in a quiet way." I haven't been actively mourning all that time, but I've needed the inward-focused time. The routine. The consolidation. The stock-taking. I have had to, and have had the opportunity to, consider who I am now that I no longer have elderly parents to worry about.
In the past two months, a couple of work-like projects appeared on my horizon. One of them is for pay; one isn't. Both involve writing words for someone else. In their own ways, both projects have reminded me that words "out there in the world" have potential power.
One of the projects I won't be discussing. The other is a series of columns about hearing loss that are appearing in my local newspaper this month. This week's column is about coping with hearing loss--yours or someone else's.
Wednesday, at a meeting, a woman who is profoundly hard of hearing shared that this particular column had appeared at exactly the right time. Her family, who was as sympathetic as most families are to those with hearing loss--which is to say, not nearly enough--was visiting her. She pulled out the column to show them. The column gave them all a way to talk about how difficult communicating is--for all of them. They had a pleasant few days together, the most pleasant in some time.
I'm happy that they had this experience. It's nice to hear nice things after you've worked on a project, no matter how pleasant the work was to do in the first place. But in no way do I take credit for smoothing a family's time together--they did that themselves.
Note that above I said that words have "potential power." Like a hatchet, language is powerful tool, but someone has to wield it. This family used the hatchet to chop through years of miscommunication and resentment. They could have hacked each other to bits with it just as easily. All I did was tie the sharpened rock to the stick.
I work with words because I believe (because I must believe) that most people don't create conflict lightly. Most people are curious and generous and want to understand each other. If they're unsympathetic, it's because they're busy, not because they're malevolent.
That's why I find much political discourse , on both sides of the border (and on both sides of the issues in the U.S.), increasingly difficult to take. Pundits and many politicians grab their language hatchets with the philosophy, "Cleave or be cloven"--and so create that reality.
But back to Yang Time: It is nice to have my hatchets floating around in public again. May they all be used to cut through dead undergrowth, and other crap, to let the light shine in again.
