Someone emailed me concerned because another person warned…

Someone emailed me concerned because another person warned them about "wokeism" and they didn't understand. I said, "Exactly!" I never use the term or address it. I said, "Ask them to define it and engage in their answer instead of the term."

We need better conversations.

@trillianewbell

As someone who get’s accused of being woke from time to time this tweet from Trillia really stuck out to me. 😅

Putting aside for a moment; my wife and I have this thing we don’t agree on. Namely what the term “around noon” means. I think it means “between 11:45 and 12:15” and she thinks it means “between 12:00 and 1:00.” As you can imagine, this has lead to differing expectations about when something is going to happen. Even though my definition of what “around noon” is makes perfect sense to me, I don’t use that term anymore. Or at least I try not to. 🤦‍♂️ Just yesterday I said “I’ll be back from my run around noon” but corrected it to say “I’ll be back by 12:15.”

As I’m learning here and as Trillia states, I’m learning to engage the answer and not the term. Even a couple of weeks ago when I was posting a lot of deconstruction stuff I found it super difficult to get on the same page with people as to what deconstruction even meant. Maybe some things are too complicated to boil down to pithy one-word phrases and need time and energy to explain properly? Those things surely don’t tweet well, but maybe more time and energy is required to have to better conversations we long to have?

In the end, it doesn’t matter who was right about what “around noon” means; we’re communicating better and that seems more beneficial than settling on a winner.