HOW ARE YOU?

“The simple act of checking in with one another feels different now. What was once a cursory, even automatic, “How are you?” has often softened into, “How are you holding up?” or, “How are you doing today?” It’s as if these two extra words, appended to our usual greeting, are an invitation to be honest about how we’re feeling — to say something other than “good” or “fine.” This is from writer Ocean Vuong
who has long noticed how we grow numb to language when its ubiquitous, rote, rehearsed — and what’s at stake when we stop examining the words we use.

Krista Tippett spoke with Vuong at On Air Fest in Brooklyn back in March, just days before the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a global pandemic. Even then, he said “How are you?” doesn’t go deep enough.

“What happens to our language, this great, advanced technology that we’ve had, when it starts to fail at its function and it starts to obscure, rather than open?” Vuong said, “The great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet, still not know who they are. Our ‘How are you?’ has failed us. We have to find something else.” This task — to find something else — falls on all of us.”

Just adding the two words ‘holding up’ or ‘doing today’ makes a complete difference in how we ask one another, “How are you?”

“To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus