It started with my English professor. We were talking about Charles Dickens, his love of overwhelming detail and movement, his hatred of stagnancy. “What he’s saying,” my professor said, slowly smiling during our seminar, “is that you ought to mean what you do. Be deliberate, intentional, meaningful.”
Whether it was supposed to be interpreted this way or not, I took those words to mean “don’t do what you don’t want to.” If your every act ought to have a purpose, then your every act ought to be related to something that you actively want, either a direct desire or a roundabout wish.
“Say what you mean, and mean what you say,” is the overused and cliché way to explain this. “Be deliberate,” at least in my mind, has a more attractive ring to it.
Sometimes this kind of action gets you in trouble. Before I started twisting this aphorism — “be deliberate,” “be deliberate,” “be deliberate” — around in my head and took it up as a sort of mantra, I hadn’t thought so much about all the things I do more for others rather than for myself. I’m not talking, in this case, about altruistic endeavors — you may very well volunteer somewhere to benefit others, and there’s absolutely no harm in that.
What I’m talking about are arbitrary obligations, actions we feel unnecessarily bound to for no other reason than because it’s what’s always been done. Majoring in something because it appears more useful than whatever actually interests you; staying with a person who, while potentially wonderful and inarguably comfortable, you don’t wholeheartedly care for; taking on a position you can’t commit to but others swear suits you; following down a line of tradition you don’t feel bound to but are told is necessary — the list of imaginably realistic scenarios goes on.
In other words, to be deliberate is to be pointed. Adhering to this ideal is to intend for your every action to automatically gain some kind of newfound meaning. This isn’t done out of malice or manipulation; it’s not to further yourself or sneakily promote your own position, but rather to make otherwise empty actions purposeful. Suddenly, there’s a reason — a thought, a hope, a moment of reflection, an end goal — behind each something that you do.
Easier said than done. But there’s still something attractive about the ideal.
An example unfolded before me when I was talking to a friend the other day, and she declared in a proud whisper that she was going to ask her unknowing crush-from-afar to her upcoming date function. “Where’s the harm?” she asked aloud boldly. “I’m trying to be more transparent, trying to say what I feel, what I want.”
This goal of transparency isn’t too far off from my English teacher’s aforementioned point of being deliberate; both center on the idea that one shouldn’t be ashamed of sharing what they’re seeking. In talking further with this friend, we realized that while we both consider ourselves to be rather spontaneous people, we’re still arguably too quick to fall into routine.
Opportunity is a double-edged sword, offering potential for success and for failure, as well as varying degrees of either in between. From afar, the sweet, safely-imagined picture of opportunity is alluring and attractive. But when it comes ever so slightly closer, we hide from it because opportunity presents potential discomfort, and discomfort, unsurprisingly, makes us uncomfortable. It’s unknown, and it’s scary.
And when the right-now is working out well enough, why venture into that unknown — why share what we’re thinking, why migrate out of the comfort zone and put purpose behind our action? We haven’t done anything with this intention before, and we’ve still come far enough.
Being transparent is just a piece of the larger puzzle that is to “be deliberate.” Transparency doesn’t condone recklessness — in the situation of my friend, she was agreeing neither to carelessly wear her heart on her sleeve nor to laxly open herself up to a fistful of damning vulnerabilities. She’s deliberately choosing to be open, to take advantage of and make opportunity and to be a little bolder. To make important things said, rather than leave them unheard.
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