The Gift of Your Voice:
The Gift of Your Voice: What You Owe The World
If you have the privilege of being able to speak, read, or write then you are intrinsically influential in this world. If you can do all three, then you are more privileged and empowered than the majority of your forebearers as well as many people living today.
Proficiency in the Triad of Literacy (Speaking, Writing, and Reading) brings with it the gifts of information, learning, and powerful creative influence.
Each piece of this tripartite is characterized by unique and meaningful qualities.
Being able to read opens the door of the mind to information, stories, and wisdom that would be otherwise inaccessible through our immediate physical environment. Each new piece of data, each new character and morsel of wisdom expands the horizons of our potential and reflects back to us a greater depth of our own humanity.
Being able to write is then the gift and skill to offer the abovementioned benefit to others. With writing comes the capacity to concretize our ideas, feelings, and experiences in an enduring and meaningful way. Writing brings with it a broadening of the channel, an expansive branching of our ability to catalogue and disseminate information.
Underlying both of these skills is the capacity to speak. Whether it be solely and silently in the mind, or made manifest into the material world through our voice, speech is fundamental to this trinity. Speech brings with it the ability to hold ideas & objects from the past, engage with and express the sensual and emotive nature of our being, and generate new shared understanding between hearts & minds.
Each of us were gifted speech first, through the voices of our parents or caregivers. As we grew the amorphous and meaningless sounds in our environment transformed into the meaningful sound-symbols that populate our inner and outer worlds. Every word we have ever spoken came first from beyond our body, through our ears or eyes. Herein we touch the gifted nature of this trinity.
Granted that you are able to hear and speak, read and write, then the following is true. You were given the capacity for sight, hearing, and thought at birth. These skills needed to be developed, but their nascent capacity was within you all along. This is a gift, as nothing was asked of any of us in exchange for this capacity.
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.
How is it that our voices are so powerful?
Recall the influence that the capacity to hear & speak, read & write has on the human mind. This powerfully transformative quality is innate to speech, sound, and thought. We are transformed by what we receive from the world (listening & reading) and we transform the world in turn by what we emanate and emit (speak and write).
This influence is inescapable in two important ways.
1. The necessity of speaking/listening, reading/writing – we can hardly get by in this world without them.
2. Perhaps most importantly, these phenomena are intrinsically influential. The quality and scope of their influence is malleable via our intention and application but the fact that they influence the world is innate and inseparable.
So, we have to engage with these powerful and influential phenoma-skills and their capacity to influence is inescapable. This means that we are, conscious of it or not, constantly influencing our world. Recognizing this fact is of vital importance and is central to the latter half of this blogs title “What You Owe The World”.
Many beings raised with a Western-Individualist ethos might scoff at the notion of owing anything to anyone outside of an explicit deal. Indeed this is a foreign concept to a culture whose sights have been transfixed on Rights and Freedoms for the better part of two hundred years.
Each individual has the right to exercise the expression of their Triad of Literacy: to speak and wite freely, and to listen to/read that which they will. However, these rights come with a set of responsibilities. In fact, all rights do.
So what responsibilities come along with the rights and gifts of this trinity?
Two jump forth in my mind as most relevant.
1. To uphold and protect the rights of others
2. To steward our influence so that it too may be a gift unto the world.
Let’s look at each of these:
Firstly, upholding and protecting the rights of others. Specifically the aforementioned rights to free speech, free expression, and freedom of conscience (reading/listening among other expressions).
Upholding and protecting these rights for others likely feels like a lofty task. The grandeur of this undertaking will cease to be insurmountable when we acknowledge that the responsibility herein is limited to the scope of our actions. In other words, we are responsible to conduct ourselves in a way that best upholds and protects the rights of others – rather than needing to seek out and right every instance of rights violations worldwide. By conducting ourselves in a way that balances the expression of our rights with the protection of the rights of others, we ensure that our society is one wherein these rights are enjoyed and inherited long into the future.
To conduct ourselves in such a manner is, in part, ensconced in the second listed responsibility: To steward our influence so that it too may be a gift unto the world.
We accept that we as thinking, speaking beings are inescapably influential. We accept that the quality of our influence will shape our life, and the lives of those with whom we share this world. Further, this influence was a gift and thus ought to be approached and exercised with a noble reverence, replete with intention and care.
Where does our transition from the commonplace, taken for granted, humdrum speech, into an empowered, influential, and generative relationship begin?
It begins with
The What, Why, How, Where and When of Speech:
We can approach a new understanding of our expression, in speech and writing, with these 5 categories.
The What:
The literal words, diction, vocabulary that constitute your expression: The linguistic contents.
The Why:
This is discovered through one’s own honest inquiry: the reason why you are choosing to say what you are. The Why is the driving force, the motivation behind expression. Without a clear vision of our why, our voice can be possessed by unconscious motivations (or worse, the intentional and nefarious influence of others).
The How:
Herein we find The Art of Speech. This is the tone, cadence, pitch, and rhythm of your voice. The crafted delivery that carries valuable information beyond the words to the listener.
The Where and When:
Location and Context are vital elements to powerful communication. There is a adage attributed to Lady Dorothy Nevill that embodies this beautifully:
“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place, but, far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
It is best to speak to those who are likely to listen to you. This may seem obvious, but many of us waste hours of our lives attempting to open ears that are altogether closed to even the smallest difference in opinion.
One final element will support us in ameliorating our gift into one of positive and influential harmony: Aligning with Guiding Values
Here are three guiding values by which we can orient our expression:
Truth, Compassion, and Courage.
Truth:
This value can be understood through two underlying principles – Humility and Precision.
Humility is the means by which we protect ourselves from harming the world with our ignorance. We keep our limitations close to mind, and thus do not crash wildly and blindly into others with our falsehoods and foibles. Humility will serve as one important measure of our speech, and can be embodied in this question: Do I know this to be true?
If the answer is no, then we can articulate our thoughts as beliefs rather than facts. Doing so shifts the authority away from us and onto the discerning capacity of the listener. We are no longer falsely occupying the throne of Truth
A stark and sober familiarity with our own ignorance will support us in weeding our expressions of unnecessary and potentially harmful falsehoods before they flow into the world.
Precision then, is a sharpening of focus on those things which we do know. Precision in language is to say exactly what you mean, and to mean exactly what you say.
This is no easy task, however employing the practice of refining an expression of speech into a more precise form will amplify the truth value in our speech. This offers to the listeners a higher resolution image of our ideas, and the world to which they refer.
Compassion:
This value, like Truth before it, can be understood through two underlying principles – Empathy and Justice.
Whereas Truth focuses on The What of speech, Compassion is concerned with all 5 elements. Prioritizing Compassion means weighing the potential consequences of our speech and crafting it so that it is aimed most closely to the highest good attainable. It is to be deliberately informed and conscientious of the suffering of others, and to equate (as best as one can) for their suffering as equal to our own.
Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can say will generate pain and conflict. This is acceptable and a necessary part of being an active participant in the co-creation of human society. We must risk offending others in order to speak truthfully. Balancing the consequences of our speech with the prioritization of our rights and responsibilities will prove to be the most fruitful. This balance between the mitigation of suffering, the pursuit of truthfull living, and the exercise and protection of rights is one expression of Just living.
Lastly, Courage:
This is the energy that brings a fortified willingness to potential conflict. We just noted that speaking truthfully entails the risk of conflict and pain. Therefore, in order to uphold our responsibilities we must ingest these as inevitable, and move forward with the courage to face that which arises as a consequence of our speech.
Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. I would posit that an unexpressed life is equally unworthy.
You see, the worthiness in question comes from our inescapable participation with existence. To prioritize the avoidance of conflict, or to subjugate one’s own needs and power to others is, at its core, an act without courage: cowardly and ineffectual.
Without a courageous spirit fuelling ones influence, a truly great gift will remain withheld from the world. The gift of your voice.
Let us then revel in the gift so freely given. The gift of understanding, expression, and influence. The gift of the opportunity to be, to do, and to know this world as deeply as we can. The gift to leave behind us a powerful legacy: a gift in and of itself for the future generations. The very same gift we were given upon our first breath.
To close, we repay the richness of our literacy and communication by offering it back into the world refined, empowered, and aimed at the betterment of the lives of those living and those yet to come. For if we do not, this world will miss out on a powerful force of good, one that was always meant to speak up and be heard.