One of the finest things about being a baby is that our minds can be read by others.
Without us needing to say anything, people around us will have a guess at determining
what we intend - and, typically, they’ll get it right.
They’ll correctly surmise that we are craving some milk or that the sun is shining in our
eyes, that it’s time for a snooze or that we want to jiggle the keys again.
This may be highly gratifying and important to us in infancy, but it can set up dangerous
expectations for the rest of our lives.
It can breed in us the sense that anyone - especially anyone who claims to care about us - should
be able to determine our deepest aspirations and wishes without us needing to say very
much.
We can stay silent; they will mindread.
This explains a widespread tendency to assume that others must know what we mean and want
without us having actually told them anything clearly.
We assume that our lover must know what we’re upset about, that our friends should realise
where our sensitivities lie and that our colleagues must intuitively grasp how we want things
done in presentations.
Furthermore, we assume that if they don’t, then it must be a sign that they are being
wicked, deliberately obtuse or stupid - and we are therefore justified in falling into
a sulk, that curious pattern of behaviour whereby we punish people for having committed
offences whose precise nature we refuse to reveal to them.
But in all this, we have, somewhere along the path of our development, forgotten the
fundamental importance of teaching.
Teaching isn’t a distinctive profession focused on imparting knowledge about science
and the humanities to the under 18s.
It’s a skill that we must put into practice every day of our lives - and the subject we
must laboriously and patiently become experts in and deliver ‘lessons’ on is called
‘Ourselves’: what we like, what we’re scared of, what we’re hopeful about, what
we want from the world and how we look for things to be formatted…
Babies, for all their intelligence and charm, only care about a handful of things; an average
adult has thousands of very set ideas on all manner of topics, from the right way to govern
a country to the right way to shut the fridge door.
We should strive to deliver a few ‘seminars’ on our views before allowing ourselves to
grow resentful and sullen.
Yet how understandable - in a sense - if we should fail so badly in our teaching duties.
We’re not necessarily being lazy or unkind.
It’s merely unbelievable that strangers would actually require us to talk them through
yet another chapter of the dense instruction manual of our deep selves.
We never had to bother with all that in the early years.
We may be more nostalgic for our infancy than we might
have dared to imagine.