Slow Down

The thought needs time to breathe before it can speak.

I asked a friend to take a breath today. I needed one, too. We were stuck in our opposing panic spirals, similarly motivated but conflicted in their origins. We were in a common conversation regarding the ubiquitous “kids these days,” and talking past each other. I took my breath in the moment. I took another one later in the day, when I was no longer on the university campus and better able to process the day’s stressors, including those “kids.”

As a nerd who follows both academic and mainstream discussions of education trends, especially in writing, I often get irritated when hearing people who do not teach complain about the inability of young people to think or communicate. It’s a very old, very tired, and very wrong complaint. It is disrespectful to the population of young adults I have spent a career encouraging. It is disrespectful to their teachers and support networks. It is, ultimately, disrespectful of everyone in its utter disregard for shifting cultural norms, generational code-switching, and the multiplicity of modes of communication.

Perhaps more significantly, it is ageist and inaccurate. The shifts in writing styles and literacies I see in my work both teaching at the university level and coaching writers independently are not delimited by age ranges or demographic characteristics. They appear to me, however, to be related to broad cultural, political, and conceptual changes.

To put it another way, writing and thinking have both suffered from the pandemic, whether you were in school yesterday or 50 years ago. They have also suffered from political vitriol bombarding education from outside the school walls. It suffers from the promise of no work for a mediocre-but-passable product dangling in front our collective nose in the form of AI tools. I ponder these ideas in relation to the writers I work with every day, be they 18 or 80. People are exhausted and that exhaustion shows up in their writing as well as in their cognition.

Recently, I have found myself frequently giving writers comments along the lines of “Your words are in your way. Slow down” or other pleas to stop the spinning, frenetic momentum of thought-snippets that might be the only form of expression we can comfortably manage at the moment. That the pandemic hindered the writing progression of my students is obvious in their writing. However, it is also obvious in much of the writing of people my age and older with whom I work outside of campus.

I wish I could magically provide writers with a moment to catch their breath, but I do not have that power. I can, though, provide assurance that age is not the problem. We need to approach the ongoing crisis in communication with compassion and a desire to teach, not shame, avoiding the impulse to indulge in a fantasy narrative of an idealized past. We have to relearn how to breathe.