The Interpreter

I came across a piece I wrote five years ago that would have been a blog post if I had been writing a blog then, a private reflection but a little more than a journal entry. I filed it away at the time and promptly forgot about it. But looking at it again helps me understand why I am ready to leave my current job and environmental work, even though I remain in total sympathy with the cause.

The piece began with my recurring frustration with defining my peculiar set of gifts. “I took this frustration to the swimming pool late yesterday afternoon,” I wrote. “On the way a word came to me, a role, a definition. ‘Interpreter.’ Later, ‘master interpreter.’ I am trying it on. I swam a half mile with it, put it away for the evening, asked for dreams about it. It is still with me today.”

And so it is five years later.

It begins with my facility with languages. I recall, as a young teenager, admiring simultaneous translators at the UN. Marveling at how they do it. I learned languages easily. I could maybe do that. But did I want to? I didn't think so. I knew then already that it would be too narrow a use of my gift for… what? What was the nature of my gift? I could hear, listen well. I had a good ear. I was also intelligent. I could understand patterns, pick them up, reproduce them, use them. I could pick up signals--not only the signals of words but also the signals of cultures, personalities. I could read people and their intentions, guess at what they were saying even if I didn't understand every word. I could reproduce their ways as well as their words.

This gift of course goes way beyond language, or, rather, it applies to the infinite array of languages of the world and of humans in the world. It is a gift of perceptivity, a gift for attention--fascinated, devoted attention--and empathy, which combine to produce quick understanding and insight. I have learned in my life to speak and appreciate many languages and what they express and communicate. French, Japanese, science, cat. Idea language. Spoken and written language. Body language. Spirit language. Dream language. Group language. The language of circles and hierarchies. Male and female. The language of beauty and trees and oceans. I could learn to speak dolphin without much effort, if that was called for. Economics and policy language and storytelling language.

When I understand I can interpret, and this is not a simple matter of translation from one language to another (though that is never as simple as people think it should be). It is a matter of making connections, forming synapses. It is a matter of insight, putting things together in a new way that is appropriate to the situation. Spoken words into written ones. Aspirations into statements. Half-baked ideas into fully baked ones. I also have the gift of interpreting people to themselves, mirroring, though this is a gift that has to be used with great care because it is seldom asked for.

It is a question of how my brain works, I think. I do not experience the onset of full-blown original ideas. Rather, I experience the potential for connection and the longer I live and the more I know the more subtle, sophisticated, and truly original that gift for insight can become. I say, ‘the more I know’ as if it were a matter of knowledge but I do not have a good detailed memory. My mind is literally like a sieve, sifting out forgettable things but saving somewhere much that is, I believe, truly important. Or perhaps I forget things until they become important. And being ‘important’ means, to me at least, connecting with something else in a way that promotes understanding, that gets at truth.

Writing this helped me understand how I had been operating in the organization, from grant writing and reporting to fleshing out the implications and uses of the precautionary principle. My work was not separate from the work of others. My role was different, however. No one did this as consistently as I did, although we all fed off each other’s ideas. No one was as devoted as I was to making other people's ideas, or the group ideas, presentable, useful, appropriate. Helping them sing out in the world. Yes, this was a devotion. A sacred act. The Interpreter was a priestess in the temple, serving.

But now I see that the work is maturing. The songs in that arena are being sung in certain growing harmonies, and new voices are joining. My attention wanders off, pulls out old languages (French, Congo culture) and plays with them. I marvel at new languages (toddlerspeak, the latest brain science). I want to understand different sets of mysteries. I want to interpret them.