Spirit Matters: Do your words and your character correlate?

“Who you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you are saying.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Several lifetimes ago, I worked at a camp for people with disabilities. The summer staff T-shirts changed colors each year, but they had the same opening quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson printed on the back.

(A quick Google search reveals various paraphrases of Emerson’s words; these are how I remember them on the shirts.)

As someone who knows how powerful an influence words can have, I was mesmerized the first time I saw the quote. I allowed the words to turn around in my heart – to savor their meaning not only in the context of the camp but also as a truth about life in general.

Even now, those words are iconic to my almost four years of experience there.

I first read these words in the early summer of 2001, shortly after I had transitioned from my job at the corporate office of a large insurance company to this summer camp on Lake Bloomington in Hudson.

It was a significant change in my life for many reasons. One of the primary drivers for that switch was a deep-seated need to do something meaningful with my life. While jobs that provide financial security are great, following my soul’s vocation was, and remains, imperative.

In fact, if I am not doing something that I consider meaningful, my soul quickly withers, and all sorts of challenges arise. It can get even more confusing when your soul’s wisdom guides you to do something different still, when you thought you were already doing something meaningful.

The soul has its own needs and timeline and will certainly let you know it, no matter how disruptive it needs to get.

But that is a whole other column.

Before I sat down to write this, I thought of Emerson’s words and what they mean for me today in the context of my life now.

I thought of how much our world has changed in the almost 20 years since I left my job at the camp.

The role of social media in our everyday life has taken on epic proportions. By spending so much time taking in all of this information, our lives have become so much more fragmented.

In the last eight to 10 years alone, we have seen just how much the information we ingest – and the opinions we read – can affect us, often in a negative way.

It has not been uncommon for family members and friends to “block” or unfollow each other after discovering they hold vastly different opinions about politics and other topics.

And the way some people recklessly spew vitriol on social media threads, while hiding behind their electronic devices, is staggeringly disturbing.

In countless ways, basic decency and respect have disappeared. But even more, one’s consistently negative or inflammatory posts say much more about that person than the specifics of what they have to say. After a while, all you see is the character behind the words and not the words themselves.

It seems to me that Emerson’s words, written in the 19th century, are more powerful, more necessary and more medicinal than ever today.

For all the multiplicative advances we have made in gathering information in the 21st century, sometimes we need to turn down the noise and listen to the voices of wisdom that speak through time from quieter, less chaotic, less invasive eras.

“Who you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you are saying.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

SPIRIT MATTERS is a weekly column by Jerrilyn Zavada Novak that examines experiences common to the human spirit. Contact her at jzblue33@yahoo.com.