The Unremarked Days

There were three ways the world came into you, when you were growing up. They did not announce themselves as three; they came in mixed together, and you absorbed them as a single thing called the world. But they were not a single thing, and learning to tell them apart and to feel, in the moment, which of the three you are dealing with, is one of the cleanest pieces of equipment a person can be given for the work of becoming honest with oneself.

The first is the thing that was said. The explicit instruction. The lessons of the household, the schoolroom, the temple or the church or the mosque if you were brought up to one of them. The do's and dont's those who taught you repeated. The rules your elders laid down. The values of the school your headmaster spoke about at assembly. The doctrines of your religion, if any, that were articulated to you in so many words. This is the channel of inheritance you have probably been most aware of, because it arrives in language, and language is what you have for examining what you have received. You can repeat what was said to you. You can argue with it. You can agree or disagree as your mind inevitably learns to do. You can pass it on or refuse to pass it on. The said is the channel that is most easily brought up into the light of day for inspection. This is also why it is the channel that, when something has gone wrong with your formation, is the slowest to highlight the damage. What is 'said' is what gets corrected first, because correcting it is easiest, and the people inside a household or a school or a country can continue to say the right things long after the other channels have stopped agreeing with the saying.

The second is the thing that was felt. This is the channel below speech, the things that came in to you not through anyone's telling but through the way the people around you held themselves, the way they reacted before they thought, the small involuntary signals — a tightening at the mouth, a softening in the voice, a quick exchange of glances between two adults that meant nothing to you in the moment and that you remember now as having meant a great deal. What is felt is the air you were breathing in the house, in the school and in the street where you played. It includes the things that were never said because they did not need to be said: who in the household was respected and who was tolerated and what subjects were welcome in conversation and what subjects produced an unspecified discomfort that everyone learned to navigate around. You did not consciously absorb any of this. You took it in as a fish takes in water — without noticing it as a thing, because it was the medium you were living in. By the time you were old enough to wonder what your assumptions were, the feeling had been at work in you for so long that what it had taught you felt like simply what was true.

The third is the thing that was done. What was actually rewarded; what was actually punished; what was actually praised and what was actually shamed; who was propelled forward in the corridors of your house and your schoolyard and who was held back; whose tantrum got results and whose tears were ignored; whose word was treated as binding and whose was treated like fallen leaves. You watched all of this, even when no one was teaching you to watch. Children are exquisite observers of practice, because they do not yet have the adult capacity to discount the evidence of their own eyes when the evidence contradicts the official story. They take in what is done with the same matter-of-factness with which they take in what is felt — but unlike what we feel, which is largely involuntary on the part of the one feeling, the done is the channel through which a household or an institution most fully reveals its actual operating values and norms, as distinct from those it professes about itself.

These three came to you together, and most of the time, in most of the places that formed you, you would have learned to notice but absorb the contradictions between them as something to be expected and accommodated, (even though the explicit channel would have carried messages about why you shouldn’t). If, and whenever they were singing in unison, you would not have noticed that there were three. You would have experienced the place as one thing. The alignment between those three channels is what makes a place feel like it is working. You are not picking up three readings and assembling them into a verdict; you are receiving one thing that the three together amount to. This integration, when it holds, is a kind of quiet at the back of one's life that one does not register until it is gone. It is what makes it possible to grow up without having to do double work on every relationship — to take what one is told at face value, to assume that what feels right matches what one is told to do and to expect that what one watches being done will match both.

There is a name for what place it becomes where the said, the felt and the done are in alignment, but I am going to defer naming it until later in the book, because I want you to first be able to recognise it from its absence rather than its presence. Because you can only know what it is by what it has been like, in your life, when it has not been there.

The three channels are notoriously difficult to align at the best of times, but the bigger, stronger and more successful a place is, the more difficult it becomes. It is always up to the people in a place to do the work of keeping the three channels as aligned as possible, but something happens to a place when the people forgo that responsibility for whatever reason. The cracks become part of the architecture of the building. The people inside such a place would have received the same three readings, but they may have been receiving them for so long that they stopped noticing them as three separate channels - let alone be able to register the disagreement among them. That is because people often make a quiet truce with the cracks. The truce takes the form of treating the said as the official story of the place, even when the said is no longer matched by what is done and what is felt about what is being done. They go on repeating the said in the customary places — the meetings, the assemblies, the public statements and even at the dinner table — and they go on living by what is done. Even when they feel terrible inside as a result of the unholy compromise, they accept the discomfort and erosion of their felt morality as a fair price to pay for the benefits they stand to accrue or simply what they stand not to lose by not speaking out. It is not that they stop noticing that the saying and the doing have parted company, but they learn to accept it because they can argue and rationalise what arrives through those channels, whereas the felt channel seems so mysterious and inarticulate that they are able to dismiss what they feel as a personal delusion or blind ‘idealism’ pitted against the practicalities of the world.

You, especially if you are young, will be the one who notices, because the young especially find it difficult to make that truce. If you haven't made that truce, it is because you simply have not yet been able to convince yourself that the cracks appearing on the walls are part of the architect’s design or that the emperor is indeed wearing a magnificent robe and the only reason you are unable to see it is because you are stupid.

The most familiar form of parting is between the said and the done. You were told one thing and shown another by the same lips. You were promised that hard work would be rewarded, and you watched the lazy and well-connected promoted over the diligent and obscure. You were told that the rules applied to everyone equally, and you watched them applied to some and waived for others. You were told that your school stood for certain values, and you watched your school protect, when it had to choose, the people who violated those values rather than the people who upheld them. You were told that your country honoured certain principles, and you watched your country, when those principles became inconvenient, set them aside without admitting it had set them aside. You did not have words for what you were noticing. But you were noticing, and the noticing left a dent in your body, and the dent is part of how you now present to the world.

I want to be careful here. The gap between what is said and what is done is not always evidence of dishonesty in the people who are saying. Sometimes the gap is a sign of weakness — of people who genuinely wish to live up to what they are saying but have not yet been able to. Sometimes it is a sign of complexity — of a situation in which the principle that was articulated turns out to be harder to apply than those who articulated it knew enough to acknowledge. Sometimes it is a sign of historical lag — of a household or institution still using the language of an earlier moment without having noticed that the practice has drifted. The gap, by itself, does not tell you which of these is going on. It only tells you that there is a gap. What you do with it depends on what kind of gap it is, and the discrimination among the kinds of gaps that appear is some of the work the rest of this book will give you the equipment to inspect.

But there is one kind of gap that is graver than the others, and I want to spend the rest of this chapter on it. It is the gap that has been going on long enough, and is large enough, that those who say one thing while doing another are no longer registering the gap at all. They have stopped feeling the contradiction. They proclaim what they proclaim, and they live as they live, and the two have settled into different compartments of their lives that can no longer see or speak to each other. They are not being dishonest in the way someone is dishonest who knowingly tells a lie; they are being dishonest in the deeper way of having stopped noticing that they have been harbouring a lie for years. This kind of gap is the one that does the most damage to the young people who grow up inside it, because the young people are the ones who still see the gap and the adults around them are the ones who no longer do, and there is no language available to the young people for what they are seeing, because the adults have stopped having the language for it themselves.

If you have grown up inside such a gap — and many readers will have, because there are few places left where the gap is not present in some form — some of what you carry is the carrying of it. You may have learned, very young, to function in two languages at once: the language in which the proclaimed story of your household or your school, or country was told, and the language in which the actual operations of those places ran. You learned to use each language in the right place. You learned, also, that pointing out the discrepancy did not get you what pointing out the discrepancy should have got you; it got you, at best, ignored, and at worst, punished. You learned, in other words, to be one of the people who knows about the gap and has agreed not to mention it. This is a quiet capitulation that the people who made it almost never name as such, and it is one of the things that happens early in a person's life that determines, in part, what kind of person they become later. If this sounds all too abstract and you are thirsting for examples to make concrete sense of what I am describing, bear with me, because I am going to come back to it.

There is a third kind of parting I have not yet said much about in this chapter, and I want to do so now, but only briefly, because it is the subject of the next chapter on its own. The third channel — what is felt — is the deepest, and the hardest to bring up where it can be examined, because it never arrived in you as words. You absorbed it as the atmosphere of the places you were small in. When how you feel deep inside of you is in agreement with what you are saying and doing, you do not feel it as a separate channel; it is simply the way the world is. When how you feel about something is in disagreement with the other two, you feel something is wrong without being able to say what. It is a discomfort you cannot name and an unease that does not respond to the official story of the place. This is the chronic sense, in certain rooms, that the air is not quite right, although no one in the room is doing anything you could point to as the cause of the wrongness. These are the registrations of the third channel telling you something the other two are not telling you. Learning to take them seriously, without letting them become a paranoid sixth sense that makes you distrust everything, is one of the harder pieces of the work this book will ask of you.

For now, I want only the simple division. There are three channels through which what has formed you came in. They can agree, and when they do, you have the experience of being in a place that is whole. They can disagree, and when they disagree the place is not whole, and you, especially when you are young, will be the one who notices first. Noticing the disagreement is just the first step. It is the information that you must allow to trigger deeper and more conscious thought and eventually, wise action. How to become deeply aware and conscious of such disagreements and act on them wisely is the work I hope this book will help you to do. It is work which - if done well - will fill you with purpose, if done moderately may make you feel virtuous or justly indignant but without deep contentment, or leave you miserable if done poorly or not at all.

I would not blame you if the language of three channels still feels abstract. Let me give you, in the way I promised in the preface I would, not a case I have constructed for you, but a vessel you can fill in yourself. Somewhere in the years you have lived already, there was a place — a home, a school, a club, a place of worship or a workplace — where the official story of the place and the daily operation of the place did not match. If you don't have one in mind immediately, you will if you put the book down for a moment and think about it for a minute. The place said one thing about itself and lived another, and you were inside it for a while, and the inside-it-ness of it shaped you, and the shaping is still operating in you now. I am not going to ask you to do anything with that recognition yet. I am only going to ask you to register it. The place existed; you were in it; the gap was real; you saw it and perhaps more importantly, felt it.

That is what the rest of the book is going to build on. Everything that follows assumes that you have noticed, in your own life, that the saying and the feeling of it and the doing in places that formed you have not always agreed with each other, and that the disagreements have left dents in you that you are still carrying. The work this book proposes is the work of becoming honest about those dents, finding the company within which such honesty becomes possible, and doing what one can to keep the saying and the feeling and the doing — in oneself first, and then in the places one is part of — from coming apart in the way one has watched them come apart elsewhere. The point is not to achieve perfect alignment between all three channels. Rather, it is to understand the profoundly human fallibilities that make such perfect alignment practically impossible to maintain for any significant length of time, but also the vital and indispensable work of doing what can be done to align them, ceaselessly, nevertheless.

Before any of that work can begin, however, we have to spend a chapter on the deepest of the three channels — the one below words, the one you absorbed when you were too small to realise that you were absorbing anything. That is where the book turns next.