You don’t have to be a National Football League devotee to know that this past weekend a Kansas City Chief named Javon Belcher took his own life shortly after murdering the mother of his three-month-old daughter.
Such a tragedy transcends the relatively trivial concerns of sport, but magnitude alone is not sufficient reason for it to merit mention in a hyperlocal publication centered 1,500 miles from these horrific events. What lands it here are the pertinent postgame comments made Sunday by Chiefs quarterback Brady Quinn, because his reflections on his own obliviousness to what was happening beneath the surface of his teammate and friend can give us pause concerning how much our own interpersonal interactions may take place at superficial levels. Said Quinn:
I think the one thing [that] hopefully people can try to take away, I guess, [is] the relationships they have with people, you know? I know [after] it happened I was sitting in my head, thinking, “What I could have done different?” When you ask someone how they’re doing, do you really mean it? When you answer someone back how you’re doing, are you really telling the truth? We live in a society of social networks and Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine and stuff; but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we’re more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships we have in front of us. Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually figure out if someone’s battling something deeper on the inside than what they may be revealing on a day-to-day basis.
The term phatic communication refers to speech-acts intended to communicate sociability rather than information. The “How are you?”/”Fine” exchange is our culture’s classic example. More often than not the inquirer isn’t really inquiring, any more than the respondent has taken inventory and comes up with “fine” as a genuine summation. Although the exchange may in fact be an indication of sincere affection, it may nonetheless tell us nothing.
Such exchanges have always annoyed me, perhaps primarily because they are so inculcated that even while conscious of their phatic nature from time to time I catch myself perpetuating the process. As someone who greatly values the sentiment expressed in the maxim, “Say what you mean, mean what you say,” I don’t want to tell you that I’m fine when I’m not, and I damn well don’t want to ask you how you are unless I really want to know.
Custom is hard to break with, and I’m not sure we should hold our collective breath that everyone will start confining their queries into our well being to the occasions when they really, really want to know, nor that we will receive substantive answers even to our most genuine probings. It may be too much to hope just that people will become a little less engaged with Facebook or texting, that on the whole humanity will siphon a bit of energy from the virtual into the actual, as opposed to the reverse trend.
But as Mr. Quinn eloquently put it, perhaps there is something to be made of a terrible event like what happened Saturday halfway across the country. Perhaps that something is us, a few of us who will now refashion ourselves to be a bit more co-present to those we encounter in the flesh. That refashioning may help one of us see a sufferer among us, a sufferer we might have misdiagnosed as “fine” had we gone about our social business as usual.
You are probably not a counselor. You may be completely out of your depth in dealing with someone profoundly disturbed and desperate enough to cross lines beyond which there is no returning. But oftentimes those in such an emotional state feel invisible. And so you’re seeing, or even just your effort to see, may be a difference-maker.
One thing is sure: it can’t hurt. So when I ask you how you’re doing, please tell me the truth, whatever your truth may be.