[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Acrobat]

So your mother never taught you to say please and thank you? Or wash your hands after using the bathroom? Or to tell people "Happy Birthday" when it's their birthday?

Are these not instructions on how to be polite, thoughtful and caring human beings?

Certainly some behaviors are learned "subconsciously," through watching how our role models behave. But specific instruction is damn near just as, if not just as, important.

You're trying to downplay the importance of concise, specific instruction and it's simply not working. That you're trying to frame the unspoken as superior to thespoken is not working.

To be honest she gave us very little instructions, she’s was a poor, simple immigrant woman with a lot on her plate, trying to learn the language and custom of this country. So no, she never instructed us to say thank you, happy birthday. We seemed to have picked that up from watching other people saying it, rather than telling us to say it too.

My daughter is less than 2, and she’s learned the words “thank you”, but she says it when she gives people something and when they give her something.

Thank you is just an empty set of words, use as an abstract signal pointing to gratitude. Looking at my daughters expression when she says thank you, it seems she grateful as much when giving as she is when receiving. She’s grateful to give dad a piece of her soggy toast, and she is when I give her a bit of my meal.

So I think she understands the thing thank you is pointing to more so than many of us who use that term so frequently. That it’s not just pointing to a momentary sense of gratitude, but gratitude as a state of being.

And I don’t know many people who represent what that looks like than my mother, whose grateful when she has little and when she plentiful, she’s grateful to life, even in suffering and tragedy. She may have never instructed us to say thank you, but she bore the very meaning of it. And that seems to be a lesson many of us appear amiss to.

If you don’t know what I mean by gratitude as a state of being, no words will carry the weight of its meaning, but showing you what that looks would.

You see the sparkles of it in my daughter, an image of the sweetness of her grandmother, there’s nothing more I want her to keep for an eternity than that.