I like to monologue. That’s probably why I enjoy writing and preaching. You just sit there and listen. I don’t have to hear anything back from you till I’m done—until I’ve crafted exactly what I want to say and how I want it to fit. Then I’ll hear your thoughts, which, naturally, could only be gratitude for such poetic wisdom. I am happy to hear or read your monologue back. Isn’t that how you have a conversation? Well, as it turns out, that’s not how it works for my wife either.
My preference for turn-taking-monologues has caused a few “conversations.” My wife likes dialogue to feel more like a tennis volley rather than exchanging legal briefs. That means interjections and quick responses are fair game; whereas for me, an interruption might mean I need to go back to the preamble.
It took tripping over this dialogue difference several times before I acknowledged that my method was not the only way. To put it mildly, it’s an outlier. I come from multiple generations of teachers. That’s how I learned to talk. I can try to be 280-character pithy, but when things get serious, I revert to Lord of the Flies. I’m holding the conch shell; I get to talk.
Givenness
When you stub up against one of your idiosyncrasies—like realizing not everyone has a specific pancake-eating-sweatshirt—it’s good to reflect on that habit. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It was given to you by someone else.
Take your parents for example. That is a given you’ll spend your whole life unpacking. You will discover in your parents a whole ecosystem of givens that you were never consulted about—their jobs, personalities, zip code, religious beliefs, financials, and of course their own background of givens that they’ve been dealing with their whole life. These givens shape you profoundly. If you pretend those givens aren’t there, you’ll never understand yourself and you’ll never grow.
I’m not sure how you would quantify this, but if you consider all the objective markers that make up your identity, probably ninety percent of these you had no choice in. Maybe that estimate seems high, but I would contend that the majority of identity angst today comes from a distorted sense of this ratio. We act as if our givens account for maybe ten percent of our identity, and the rest is up to us. Our culture of hyper-individualism puts us in a panic. It makes you believe that you are creating yourself from the ground up, which puts about nine times as much pressure on every one of your decisions as you should feel.
That’s not to say you blow off responsibility, and say something like: “I’m an introvert, so I flake on people sometimes—it’s just one of my givens!” But you do have to respect givens to understand your identity. You have to ground your identity journey in the knowledge that you have entered a given world for a given amount of time within a given set of circumstances. To make the most of those givens, you should spend your life seeking to understand the Giver.
