Ever since I was young, I've had a fascination for language. Over the course of the years, I've learned a little of a lot of them. I noticed that each one required not only learning a new set of vocabulary (you could get that in a phrase book or a dictionary) and a specific set of grammatical and syntactical rules (they sell books with that stuff in it); what you learn when you embrace a new language is a new way of thinking about the world. 'Translation' never means simply replacing one set of words and phrases with another. It also means trying to migrate an experience from one cultural context and create a space for it to live in another, foreign, context. There are always things that you can say in one language that can't be said in any other.
What a poverty of outlook we impose upon ourselves and our children when we turn against multilingualism (and, therefore, multiculturalism)! People who insist that theirs is the best (and, therefore, the only reasonable) perspective on the world condemn themselves to a narrowness of viewpoint that only reinforces their distrust of others as a cultural norm (that Geert Hofstede calls 'uncertainty avoidance'). Don't get me wrong: we are all most comfortable when we're in familiar surroundings and most uncomfortable when our surroundings (physical or cultural) seem unusual or strange. At midlife, it's common for everything to feel unusual and strange.
In fact, at midlife, we're being challenged to see life and our place in it from an entirely new perspective. The language of the adult — and particularly the language of the adult male ('sports' 'business' and 'the military') — is particularly ill-suited to grasp and communicate about things that really matter. There's another language that talks about these things (dreams, passions, values, integrity, compassion, commitment, and spirituality), the language that I'm calling 'Heart'. I could as easily call it 'Spirit'. Either way, it has little in common with our language of the every-day.
Language is the tool that we use to slice up our experience into meaningful chunks. It not only allows us to make sense of that stream of perceptions that courses through us, it also allows us to share them with others in two different ways: 1) by sharing a common language, we can connect with one another, recognizing in each other that we share common experiences and then 2) through the use of language, we introduce the possibility of communicating meaningful experiences to one another, even when the other has not actually (yet) had those experiences him- or herself. Through its capacity to create limitless juxtapositions of ideas, language transcends itself, opening us to the creation of entirely new experiences: what we call poetry. By creating a mental, emotional, or spiritual experience that has never existed before, poetic language has the power to transport us beyond our perceptual and even imaginative limitations.
Now, what do you think? Is it better to take the kinds of world-shattering experiences that go to make up the midlife transition — that transport a person from mere adulthood into spiritual maturity — and attempt to translate them into the language of the every-day, or would it serve us better to challenge those who stand at midlife's threshold by expressing what we've been through in the language of the heart? Should we be trying to dumb the experience down, or should we be holding it out as something worth struggling to understand and appreciate? Let me give yet another example of what I mean.
Our culture is remarkably adverse to God-language. People are continually trying to translate spiritual experience into a language that they're familiar with: the language of the physical sciences or historical narrative. When people read religious texts (in our case, the Judeo-Christian Scriptures), they very often try to read them as scientific treatises, or historical documents. Of course, they are neither. They are written in the language of the Spirit and address experiences that cannot be expressed either by science or by history. It's something else entirely: something that takes a tremendous amount of work to learn not only a new language, but a new culture as well in order to be able to tap into the experience underlying the texts. Xenophobic as many people in our culture are, they don't want to expend that effort to expand their capacity for expression that far. Perhaps they're fearful of losing the sense of security they get from their comfortable, customary point of view.
In one approach to learning a new language, you have to rely on a certain amount of translation until you get used to the new thought patterns that you're being exposed to. Nevertheless, the aim is always to move away as quickly as possible from translation into your old language and toward actively thinking in the new language. That's why linguists have created 'total immersion' language learning. You're thrown into a situation where you have to think in the new language from the very beginning as you navigate through lived experiences. I was always told that you didn't really know another language until you dreamed in it.
So what about midlife and the language of the heart? What happens when you try to 'translate' the experience of personal authenticity and spiritual values into other languages of the every-day? Don't you risk coming up with such absurdities as trying to figure out how many hours there were in the seven days of creation or whether or not Adam had a belly button? What concepts should you use when talking about how everything you ever took for granted growing up proved largely to be wrong? How do you explain the struggle we all must wage between autonomy and destiny? How do you help someone comprehend that living a life of conformity is living a lie? How can you communicate the fact that whenever you place blame, you avoid responsibility? What language do you use to tell someone else about the courage it took to break away from expectations and to become truly self-actualized? In short, how do you teach someone to share the language of the heart?
Perhaps we should start, not so much with how your team won the game, what happened to your bottom line, or what you've adopted as your battle plan, but with what you learned about yourself from your last failed relationship, or the values that compelled you to walk away from that last job, or how you maintained your self esteem in the face of unemployment, or what it meant to you to have to cope with the death of a loved one or with a chronic illness. Try it. Write about it fearlessly. Talk about it openly to your closest and dearest confidant. Then listen very carefully and non-judgmentally. The only way to understand the language of the heart is to speak it freely. See what happens.
Heart language, spirit language, God language: all of these express the transformational realities of midlife. They're the toughest languages you'll ever have to learn; yet, once you've learned them, you'll find a depth of understanding of yourself and others that you'd never even imagined possible.
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown
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