Shared Language.
This article is part of Finding the Words, a newsletter that delivers practical insights on the day’s issues.
On a shelf behind my desk sits a book I never thought would still be there. It's called Dear Vaccine, and as much as I treasure it, it was supposed to be boxed away by now, sealed into our family's time capsule when the COVID-19 pandemic finally subsided, along with the masks, newspaper clippings, and other things we were happy to pack away after those complicated years.
But something about this book made me want to keep it close. And I'm glad I did. Because as I wrestle with the moment we're in now, where the benefits of vaccines continue to be openly questioned and trust in our health institutions has fallen to its lowest point since the beginning of the pandemic, I find myself coming back to this little book and the hope it represents.
Dear Vaccine was co-edited by my friend Tyler Meier, Executive Director of The University of Arizona Poetry Center. The book grew out of a project launched during the hardest stretch of 2020, which invited anyone, anywhere, to answer a few simple prompts about what we were living through at the time. More than 2,000 poems came in from all 50 states and 150 countries. Most were written by people who would never have called themselves poets.
When Tyler and I talked shortly after the book's release on the Mission Forward podcast, he told me that the book was never really about a vaccine, but rather about capturing the essence of that shared experience.
It's a book that gets at the heart of what connected us during one of the most disconnected times in recent history. It's also a book about finding shared language.
During our conversation, Tyler read me a poem from a writer in Michigan who had answered one of the project's prompts, "I liked...". The poet wrote: "I liked...being able to see the food stuck in between people's teeth. I was reassured that they had at least eaten something that day."
It's just a few words, but with them I feel the whole weight of that masked, isolated time, and underneath it all, something quite tender. A person watching out for strangers, hoping that they'd eaten that day.
That's the power of shared language in a complicated moment. It's not about how many words we use, but how we use them to advance the common good. Tyler described these short and powerful poems as working "at the atomic level of communication," the smallest unit, the place where meaning is made or lost. The words we use to describe our hardest challenges, he said, can shape our relationship to those moments.
Find new language for a hard thing, and you find a new way to hold it— and maybe, a new way to hold it together.
I think that's why I didn't let go of this book, because it's proof that people can come together over hard things. And if we've done it before, we can surely do it again.
There is an exercise I often use when I'm helping large groups organize around a shared mission or purpose that invites people to tell me a story, a hope, or a vision for the future in just 6 words.
Bit by bit, keep moving forward.
We are all in it together.
Where will we go from here?
The exercise is often traced back to Ernest Hemingway and serves as a delightful playground for people across divides and differences to think about what they want to say, in just a few hardworking words. No matter the environment or group, there's always brilliance in what emerges.
As I seek to understand some of today's more hard-edged views on vaccines, I wish the spirit of Dear Vaccine and those 6-word stories could take hold again.
Maybe, in fact, it can. The next time a conversation feels too big or too loaded, remember what those Dear Vaccine poets all knew: Words matter, and when we can find a way to connect over them, we can find a way to move forward, too.
Say less. Listen more. Start there.
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