These words; I do find
that whenever I need to make use of them, there’s a good chance I’m
being at least a little presumptuous, simple-minded, or sneaky. They
raise a similar red flag when I hear or read them too.They aren’t “bad” words, but they do lend themselves to a certain kind of self-deception. They often hint at more going on.
“Wish”
I find myself using the word “wish” when I’ve decided I don’t like
something the way it is, yet I’m not actually doing anything about it.
There’s no real reason to declare my wishes. Whenever I start a sentence
with “I just wish…” feel free to ignore me, I’m only wasting your time.
My whiny face has probably made you tune out anyway.Whenever I let the phrase “I wish” escape my mouth, all I really have
to say is this: “I’m not happy with things the way they are. I would be
happy if they were like
this. So there.”Not only is it useless for changing the circumstances, but it
reinforces the myth to which I’ve momentarily fallen prey: that my
happiness is dependent on my circumstances only and has nothing to do
with my attitude. It’s a bitter little plea that life isn’t what I want
it to be in this particular moment, and a dead giveaway that I’m not
prepared to do anything about it right now.Wishing is a desperate, self-defensive behavior. It gives you a
little hit of relief from a reality you don’t want to deal with, but it
sure doesn’t move things along.Of course, in those moments, I’m too consumed by my fantasies to see
that my attitude is usually the biggest and most damning feature of the
present circumstances. If my attitude sucks, the circumstances suck. But
acknowledging that would mean I have to be responsible for it, and it’s
easier to instead wish for the Calvary to appear on the horizon and save me.
“Try”
I don’t know about you, but I know I insert the word “try” into a
sentence when I’m not actually willing to take on the responsibility of
promising I’ll do something. Yet I’m still willing to pretend I at least have the
intention of doing it — somewhere in my mind.I’ll try to call and ask about that. I’ll try to exercise every day. I’ll try to get it done on Friday after work.It means: I might end up doing that if it’s easier than I expect it to be.
Try is the ultimate catch-all qualifier for anyone looking to commit
absolutely nothing to a particular effort. It’s not even particularly
sneaky anymore. We know what it means
“Should”
You should clean this place up. I should exercise more. They should make this illegal.Like wish,
should is often used as a way of placing
responsibility for your quality of life on other people or the world
at large. Whenever humans encounter some kind of inconvenience or
difficulty, the first thought is always something resembling “Wouldn’t
it be nice if this moment was easier than it is?” The mind searches for a
way to characterize oneself as the victim of some unthinkable
injustice, and a should-based thought is born. In our mind’s eye we step
momentarily into an alternate space where everything feels just and
right to us.
One of the more common forms is “They should outlaw [whatever thing
is most unpleasant to you at the moment].” I’ve even heard people say
(including myself) things like, “Anybody who cuts in line should be
shot.” Clearly many of these should-reactions are not meant to be honest
appeals for a better world, just a little fantasy of a parallel world
where this particular problem isn’t happening to you right now, because
in that world things are the way they should be.Most shoulds are really just desperate pleas for your moment to be
less troublesome to you, whether your trouble stems from a tiny inconvenience or a profoundly disturbing aspect of human behavior (such as violence.)Now, just because we recognize how absurd it is to respond to
troubling circumstances only by “shoulding” about people and
circumstances around us, it doesn’t mean that the situation is fair, or
that we can’t do anything to change it. The problem might represent a
real, glaring injustice that causes a lot of suffering for people, and
which could potentially be changed with some effort.
Yet the first reaction to any troubling situation is almost always to
simply declare that this moment *should* be something closer to what
would sit right with you, and most of the time we’re not prepared to do
any more than just say so.So in my wiser, more centered moments, I don’t bring out the word
should unless I’m prepared to make it the way it ‘should’ be. Usually
I’m not.
“Deserve”
This one can get ugly. I’ve almost cut this one out of my vocabulary
completely because I’ve found so few instances where it isn’t absurdly
presumptuous.Any smoker who gets cancer deserves it. Criminals deserve whatever
happens to them in prison. What does a person have to do to “deserve” some horrible fate? How
does one know what amount of “caused pain” warrants X amount of
“deserved pain” and why do we assume that we (or anyone) are in a
position to make a meaningful assessment of it?Even among reasonable people, deserve gets out of hand quickly,
because we tend to make our most sweeping assessments when we’re really
worked up emotionally. I’m not a violent person, but at times I’ve
convinced myself that somebody who tags a fence deserves a serious
beating, that careless people deserve to get in horrible accidents, that
drug addicts deserve misery.Deserve is really just a more specific type of
should, one which refers to what fates people ought to experience. Most violence is rationalized with “deserve”.
Deserve also serves as a way of becoming more comfortable with
tragedy by making a “closed loop” of it. Sure, that guy got run over by a
forklift, but he was being pretty careless, so…It’s gratifying to decide what people deserve, particularly if we
know nothing about them except for the one behavior we witnessed or
heard about. This is what mainstream news is all about. The typical
story is like this: “Something terrible happened today, many people
suffering, who deserves the blame?”And that’s the fun part, the payoff. The discussion surrounding who
deserves to be ostracized, fired or killed is always more attractive
than the one about how we can help. This kind of talk is now so
pervasive on television, it’s become a new pastime: the
self-satisfaction of attributing blame to people we don’t know over
great distances, working only from tiny slivers of single-sourced
information.The more distant we are from the person, the easier it is to decide
what they deserve. If the smoker who dies of cancer is some guy on the
news, he deserves it. But if he’s your uncle or your dad, you know it’s
never as simple as that.
***
These Words.
