Someone I used to date once asked me, “Why can’t you just be a teacher?” as I struggled over jobs and dreams and having myriad passions. I do love teaching and deeply respect educators, but it’s not a singular career path I want to take, and I resolve not to date anyone else who would have me whittle my aspirations down to anything beginning with “just.”
Although I write this on Jan. 2, that’s not my New Year’s resolution, but a general life decision. It reminds me of a lovely little scene in Finding Neverland, a 2004 movie in which Johnny Depp played J.M. Barrie. In the scene he is talking with Peter, a young boy who’s already too world-weary to accept Barrie’s imaginative theatrics:
Peter: This is absurd. It’s just a dog.
J.M. Barrie: Just a dog? Just. Porthos, don’t listen!
Porthos dreams of being a bear, and you want to shatter those dreams by saying he’s just a dog? What a horrible candle-snuffing word. That’s like saying, “He can’t climb that mountain, he’s just a man,” or “That’s not a diamond, it’s just a rock.” Just.
Dream high.
Beautiful. This is not a resolution. It is sound advice for living a full life.
Well said, and concisely, too!
Thanks for reading
This is so cool. I never thought of “just” being a diminishing qualifier. I often try to summarize my feelings by saying “it’s just that I’m sensitive about this,” when in reality my feelings are complex and huge. But “just” can also show the tiny bit more we have to go: “just one more mile.” But even that is never true: we never have “just” a little bit more to go. Maybe it’s a way to make our goals seem smaller and more manageable as we fully press on. Maybe it’s a necessary lie to make the fullness of ourselves more understandable in the moment. This may work as long as we do not forget the truth.
Oh I like hearing how you think about the word “just”! I hadn’t thought about those uses, but I did think about “just” as in “fair” and how much more likely I am to write about things that are “unjust” on this blog, haha.
That’s interesting too. That unjustness becomes a subject, kind of like that essay on the nytimes how humiliation becomes a subject. I wonder sometimes if I am prone to writing things that are more about self-mockery than anything.