Nothing Was Said Again Tonight

Twenty minutes out. Twenty minutes back. Two people, a road, and about nine sentences between them, most of them about a dog.

And you came in and put the kettle on and something in you said: again.

That is the word. Again. Which means there is a count running, and a count means there is a target, and a target means these walks are being scored, and you did not set out to score anything.

I think it started innocently. You read somewhere that children talk when they are walking, and it is true, and you took it as a description of what should happen. And a description that becomes an expectation becomes a standard, and a standard can be missed.

So there is now a way for a walk with your son to fail, and there did not used to be one.

A time to keep silence

There is a list in Ecclesiastes that puts silence and speech on the same footing, which almost nothing else does.

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak. (Ecclesiastes 3:7, King James Version)

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

Read the structure. Every pair in that chapter has two halves and neither half is the good one. Rending and sewing. Silence and speech. They are laid out as equals, and the whole point of the passage is that both belong.

You are looking at silence given the same standing as speech, and it was never the poorer half of that pair. Ecclesiastes 3:7 puts keeping silence beside speaking without ranking them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as permission rather than as a consolation for a quiet evening.

And notice how the list works. It does not tell you which time it is. The whole chapter refuses to hand anybody a way of knowing in advance, which means an evening that turns out to be a silent one was not the wrong kind of evening.

You have been given no way of knowing in advance, and it was never possible to walk out of a door knowing which sort of walk it was going to be. The written word declines to identify the times, and the Spirit of God is what stops a father grading an evening he could not have chosen.

What the scoring costs

Now let me name what the count is doing, because it is not neutral.

A scored walk is a different walk.

If there is a target, then some part of a man is monitoring, and monitoring is audible. Not in what gets said. In the small pauses, the very slightly leading question, the half second of waiting for something that did not arrive.

And a seventeen year old walking beside a man who is waiting for something is not in a quiet room. He is in a room with an expectation in it, and expectation is precisely the thing that stops a sentence starting.

A quiet walk is a whole walk, and the scoring is the only thing in it that has been failing.

You are not failing to reach your son, and it was never the silence that was the problem out there. Ecclesiastes 3 puts silence and speech on level ground, which is exactly why the Spirit of God goes after a count rather than after a quiet evening.

And there is the other cost, which is what it does to the good nights. When something is said, you will file it as a success, and the filing turns it into evidence for the method rather than a thing your son said. He will feel that too, eventually, and it will make him say less.

Do not evaluate it

So the practical part, and it is a subtraction rather than an addition.

Walk twenty minutes and do not evaluate it afterward in any way at all.

You are able to come home without a verdict, and it has never once been required that an evening be assessed. The passage lists the times without identifying which is which, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man putting a kettle on and not saying again.

That means: no again. No thought about whether that went better than last week. No mental note about what you might try. No mentioning to your wife that he did not say much.

Every one of those is the count, and the count is the thing that has to go.

And it will be uncomfortable, because at the moment the scoring is what makes the walks feel purposeful, and without it the first few will feel pointless. That is the withdrawal and not the truth.

You are able to walk with no purpose attached, and it has never once been a wasted twenty minutes to have been beside somebody. Ecclesiastes 3:7 sets keeping silence and speaking on the same line, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a road with a father who has stopped counting.