There are certain questions where the answers cannot be a rehash of memory and experience. Is an ‘answer’ even required? The key word here, ‘care’, touches the confines of my brain like bubbles in those ancient screen savers! They touch the edges, dissolve, and a seemingly new bubble emerges to shoot aimlessly in a straight line. How expected and typical and…known. I think I can hold out for a while. There is space around this question. There is no pressure to perform.
I don’t want to know what it means to care. I stare at the laptop screen. A quiet Sunday morning, faint bird calls, the loud hush of the fan, and a cool breeze entering the window. The heat of the question remains and as an escape and a distraction I turn to the etymology of the word. There is an explosion of information. The word ‘care’ in English has several ancestors. From Middle English to Old English, further back to the Germanic, to Old Norse and Old Saxon. It is interesting that in all these languages—and thus in these societies—the reference is to grief, sorrow, worry anxiety, lament, the sickbed. Is this the ‘care’ in the question? Then unexpectedly there is a Gothic kara which means ‘concern’ and the Latin cura, that which heals, restores health. What brings this shift in meaning? This search has presented an ambiguity.
Meanwhile the question has not gone away.
Recently a young colleague asked during dialogue: “What is it to care for my grief, to care for my loneliness?” Not to run away, not to wallow. But to care for it, look after it, to listen to it.
So, in care is there listening? Is active care, active listening? Across human interactions there is advice and information on the need for the skills of caring and listening. It is seen as a competency and various lists of listening skills are available. In a dhrupad lesson the teacher said, “Try listening to the whole. If you just try to master the specific patterns there will be something accumulated, something to show. But that is not what this music is about.”
Listening, to quote William Stringfellow is a “…primitive act of love…” when you “…listen[ing] to the word as the word is being uttered.”1
So, in care, when you listen, thought is quiet and minimal. In that state, you are without defence and the mind is open to the other. Is this then an essential quality of the ‘care’ in question? And all else flows from this…
1 William Stringfellow, Count it All Joy, 1999