The best part of giving advice is seeing the ways people surpass it.
I’m giving homeschool advice monthly over at the Stella Maris Center. That seems a bit premature given that I still have young children, all of them girls, and don’t necessarily intend on homeschooling forever, but it’s been a fun and enlightening exercise.
As Leila Lawler points out, people mistakenly believe that giving advice or stating an opinion is proclaiming your conviction of being totally right on a subject. It’s just an opinion! Refutation welcome.
Opinions and advice—the good kind—are not limited solely to individual experience. Without an element of lived experience, much advice will ring hollow and have limited positive application. But advice should not be wedded to one particular, unique circumstance.
Advice is the gathering up of objective facts and an array of personal experiences. These can be collected through listening and observing and also through reading what people have to say about their lifestyle and choices. The written words about people’s lives, however, are subject to aspirations and pure fantasy. Cultivating discernment is necessary for reading advice.
All that to say, in addition to advice about dating and snacking and table coverings—and even advice about how to do things you don’t want to do, like get divorced—I’m now giving advice about homeschooling. That’s a lot of advice!
The pitfall of advice-giving is, of course, abject hypocrisy. The world of the internet has enjoyed a revelry of schadenfreude upon the arrest of Ruby Franke, mother of many, internet minor celebrity, and parenting advice giver. So, beware the giving of advice, as you may end up duct-taping the limbs of your beloved offspring and neglecting to feed them. It doesn’t get much darker than that!
For most of us, there is not total hypocrisy but merely the uncomfortable distance between how we wish to act and how we end up acting. This is not hypocrisy, necessarily, but can be chalked up often to ordinary human frailty.
One of the benefits of being the type of person willing to embarrass yourself by giving advice is that you are sometimes compelled to take your own advice. A mother (hypothetical mind you) with a penchant for forceful cusswords may finally find a solution to a perpetual problem in the slow and steady practice of recollecting oneself each and every time the offenses occurs. Really, how can you publicly give advice on child rearing while failing so miserably at basic curtesy in your own home? That small act of stopping and apologizing for each offense changes the trajectory. You are no longer an angry person who swears constantly, but instead an ordinary mother who struggles with anger every day of her life but chooses to offer serene reassurance to children and bystanders.
In this and so many other ways giving advice is a potentially very embarrassing position. It can also be an attempt, however fraught, to implement order in a universe of entropy Becoming an adult means moving beyond the comfortable orbit of perpetual irresponsibility.
It’s also not so much the specifics of the advice, though that is sometimes important. Giving advice, attempting to be the adult in the room, is a step toward action. In the current moment, rife with victimhood real or imagined, advice opens up possibilities where despair tempts us. A culture afflicted by anxiety and depression is one so wrapped up in abstractions, no action can occur. If you do not think the illusion of a total loss of agency has swept through every level of society, pay attention to how people frame personal circumstances—theirs and others’—and you will hear a litany of reasons why absolutely nothing can change. We are all like Sylvia Plath lamenting the futility of bathing…we’ll just get dirty again!
True enough, but it makes all the difference in the meantime to be clean and tidy, if only for a moment. We are beings who long for eternity imprisoned in a fallen world. Our efforts are Sisyphean, continually unmade, but it is our finding the heart to do them again that makes all the difference.
What I mean to say is that advice need not be followed to be effective. Having someone point out to you a positive action you can take may be enough to open your eyes to the near-infinite array of action available to you. Whether or not you “solve” a problem in your life or permanently right an irritating spouse or wayward child, the fact of having done something (within yourself, in the substance of your own life, not to the other poor people who live with you) will improve your view of the world.
When advice is bestowed, the beauty of bottom-up thinking means that people can individualize it, apply it to their own situation, and take action far beyond anything the advice giver could have imagined. The best part of giving advice is seeing the ways people surpass it.
