Mindlessly Understanding

They call it scripting.  Parroting.  Parroting is to repeat back mechanically what a person has just said.  Mechanically.  To repeat mindlessly. An echo.  Mindlessly.  To repeat or imitate especially without understanding.  Understanding. You can read more about how I feel about this here:   http://wp.me/p5ACoD-1O

Lily scripts.  Parrots.  Lily speaks too.  But before she spoke she scripted.  Parroted.  Practiced.  Every sentence every word.  There were times we were all lost in translation.  But rare was it I couldn’t translate.  If I didn’t understand today I would think about it until tomorrow or until I solved the mystery of what she meant by what she said so when she said it again (which she always did) I could understand and have an answer.  And I did.  Lily recited music before books and movies.  Don’t we all? Do we not all remember the lyrics to our favorite songs when he hear it play? Sometimes we hear it in our heads.  Sometimes we sing it out loud.  We parrot.  We mindlessly echo our favorite songs.   Without understanding.  Right?  Or does the hair stand up on your arms when you remember the place you heard it? Or the person you were with? Or what you were wearing? The smell of what was in the room and the feeling of what you stood on or sat in the first time you heard it? What is singing like? Remembering.  Forcing your feelings into the words of someone else.  Making it fit.  My daughter sang.  She sings.

Then she spoke.  All those sentences.  The parroting.  The mechanical repetition of words rearranged themselves into something called sentences.  The mindless echo of not understanding the words she would use in her own sentences someday bloomed into the flower of speech that sends out words like seeds planted that spring forth the very ideas she is made of.  They spread their roots, reach up to the sun and explode into paragraphs of what is happening, what has happened & what will happen next.   Her mind is a garden.

They call it scripting. Repeating stories.   Parroting. Mindlessly.   Without understanding.   Lily picked up a book just the other day.  Not just any book.  But one she knew well the words of.  She didn’t script it.   She read the words & pointed to each one.  After each page she gave me a description.  And in her own words she told me what would happen next before she read it.   Each memorized page was read like it was the first time she ever heard the book.  Every word was new & unspoken.

After watching her for a while I said to her out loud what I was thinking as she described every detail she could on each page.   “I love hearing your little voice talk.”  She said back to me, “I grew, better now.”

Indeed.