The languages with which we engage have been carried in the hearts and on the tongues of our ancestors, to be delivered to us at the moment of our birth through the voices of our kin. It was they, our kin, who helped mould our minds to receive, recognize, and emulate this gift. And later still, to transmute our understanding into the symbols we know as the alphabet so that we may read and write freely. This too was a gift.
And this is where many of us find ourselves; unknowingly and yet deeply empowered with the gift of speech and literacy. Writing has ceased to be a technological marvel and is now simply a commonplace occurrence of our daily lives. Reading is no longer known as a privileged luxury but rather as a necessary skill, or worse, a dull chore.
These precious gifts have fallen below the threshold of gratitude and their innate potency is overlooked by so many in today’s world. This is nothing short of a genuine tragedy.
The tragic nature of this occurrence swells beyond our collective failure to recognize the gifts we carry daily. The tragedy lies equally in the stark fact that this failure has led to our ignorance of the innate and inescapable power of our voices.
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Just as Art varies in quality, so too will each expression of speech. The quality of one's capacity to reply, either reactively or thoughtfully, can be called one's “Response-ability”. How we reply will vary depending on the context, topics, and persons with whom we are speaking; and yet the importance of that quality remains. How we speak and reply has very real and tenable consequences on the wellbeing of others, and the world around us. As such, ameliorating the quality of our Response-Ability is our responsibility.
We can support our efforts to uphold this responsibility by examining what is commonly meant by being “reactive”. In order to do this, we must first recognize that all Responses are Reactions. By responding, we are acting back towards a situation. A Reaction, insofar as it is a concept, is characterless beyond being “a doing” directed back towards a given situation.
