The iconic TV personality Judge Judy had a saying, “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason!” She could have said, “You have two feet, two hands and one mouth for a reason…”
The point is that we LOVE to talk. Everyone has an opinion to express themselves on various media and we all consume the “Talkie” in abundance. It’s like a lullaby that rocks us to sleep, but the sleep seems more dangerous as time goes by.
I’m guilty of the same thing. I have no clue how the new tax laws will affect us, do you? I’ve listened to “Talkie,” but haven’t done the “Walkie” to mobilize and ask questions. I’ll follow the parade now and try to pick up the pieces and make some sense out of them, but maybe mobilizing earlier may have been a better idea.
“Walkie” to me means being proactive and taking care of business. It means having something besides words to show for yourself at the end of a day.
On the other hand, “Talkie” is endless regurgitation of what is already known in different words. People do “Talkie” sometimes sincerely and seriously and sometimes arrogantly, and sarcastically. They take a position and run with it, assimilating new events into old paradigms. “Talkie, talkie and more talkie.”
It seems like the more convincing the “Talkie,” the more money people make. This doesn’t mean they’ve actually done something, produced something, or have been accountable. Maybe that’s the problem; while some of us are trying to earn a living, the talkers have free rein to reconfigure reality.
At the end of the day, someone has to “Walk the Talk” and perform acts of value. A teacher has to actually teach, a soldier has to show up and have his/her boots on the ground, a carpenter or artist has to create an object of worth, a farmer has to harvest a crop. That’s all “Walkie.” In my humble opinion, we need more of that and less of the other.
Maybe this situation is an artifact of an information processing culture as against an industrially based or agriculturally based culture? Whatever is the cause, I’ll stop my written “Talkie” now and work on the syllabus for the course I’m teaching next semester. As the blowhards create the noise, we’d best trim our sails and figure out where their winds of change are taking us!
With love,