Here’s a concrete thing that actually happened once! (More or less. Small details have been modified to extract pith.)
A girl came to me for dance lessons. One of the things that she wanted was to understand how to “push through” things that she knew her body could do, but her mind couldn’t.
We talked a lot about agency, about CARING. About how, when you know you really care, you can always find a way to push through. She wasn’t getting it.
Finally, I looked at her hair. It was strawberry-blonde, down to her knees, and always meticulously brushed, conditioned, and perfumed.
Then I asked her, “what will you let me do, to explain to you what CARING feels like?”
She looked at me and said something like “at this point, do whatever you have to.”
So I said, “watch this. This is what caring feels like.”
And I picked up a hair clipper and turned it on, and with my other hand I grabbed a fistful of her hair...
And she freaked, and screamed at me, and I let go, and she pulled away, and she stormed out. And the next week, she came back and we had a long, intense conversation about CARING.
And I would never, EVER have actually cut her hair. But if I hadn’t aggressively reached for it, and turned on the clippers, she would have seen through it. She had to get, in her gut, what was at stake.
The relationship was pretty strained after that, but she finally understood CARING.
Cool! This is exactly the sort of answer I wanted: one where you literally tell us what actually took place.
Now, could you give exactly that sort of answer—one that involves a literal account of events—but about the thing we were talking about in the first place?
Here’s a concrete thing that actually happened once! (More or less. Small details have been modified to extract pith.)
A girl came to me for dance lessons. One of the things that she wanted was to understand how to “push through” things that she knew her body could do, but her mind couldn’t.
We talked a lot about agency, about CARING. About how, when you know you really care, you can always find a way to push through. She wasn’t getting it.
Finally, I looked at her hair. It was strawberry-blonde, down to her knees, and always meticulously brushed, conditioned, and perfumed.
Then I asked her, “what will you let me do, to explain to you what CARING feels like?”
She looked at me and said something like “at this point, do whatever you have to.”
So I said, “watch this. This is what caring feels like.”
And I picked up a hair clipper and turned it on, and with my other hand I grabbed a fistful of her hair...
And she freaked, and screamed at me, and I let go, and she pulled away, and she stormed out. And the next week, she came back and we had a long, intense conversation about CARING.
And I would never, EVER have actually cut her hair. But if I hadn’t aggressively reached for it, and turned on the clippers, she would have seen through it. She had to get, in her gut, what was at stake.
The relationship was pretty strained after that, but she finally understood CARING.
Cool! This is exactly the sort of answer I wanted: one where you literally tell us what actually took place.
Now, could you give exactly that sort of answer—one that involves a literal account of events—but about the thing we were talking about in the first place?
Nope! Maybe some other time.