To respond instead of react, slow the reply down and answer for this moment, rather than with the reply you've always given. Two plain things help: a pause, such as one long exhale, and a holding line, one short, true sentence that tells someone you'll answer properly later. Then come back and give that answer.
The message arrives in the building's residents' group while Oswin is rinsing a pan.
To whoever on 14 keeps leaving shoes outside their door. The corridor is a fire route and my mother nearly fell over them tonight. Some consideration please.
Oswin lives on 14. The shoes are his son's football boots, left out on newspaper after training so the flat doesn't smell of them.
He dries his hands on his shorts and types with both thumbs. Maybe check before you announce things to three hundred people. They're a twelve-year-old's boots, not a fire hazard. Some of us are raising children, not patrolling corridors. He sends it, then a second message, shorter and worse.
For a minute the group goes quiet. Then a laughing face from someone on 22, and a thumbs-up from a stranger. The building manager posts the corridor rules, numbered, in English and Arabic.
Oswin scrolls up to his two messages and winces. He has met the woman who posted. Her mother uses a walking frame, and last week he held the main door for the two of them and their shopping.
The boots are still outside. He brings them in and stands them on the balcony. The reply he'd have liked to send takes him a while to find, and it's much shorter.
How do you respond instead of react?
You respond instead of react by answering from the moment you're in, not with the reply you've given a hundred times before. In practice that can mean pausing, saying a short holding line, and coming back later with an answer you mean. A response can be quick or slow, gentle or firm.
Some reactions go far beyond a sharp message. If yours frighten you or the people around you, if anyone is being hurt, or if you're in danger, begin with a doctor, a professional or emergency services, not an exercise. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Where there's immediate danger, ring your local emergency services first. Anyone in the UAE can also call 800111, the free helpline of the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children, which the foundation says is answered 24/7; elsewhere, your country's domestic abuse helpline is the number to find. Those calls come before anything in this article whenever the temper you live around belongs to someone else who scares you, makes threats, tries to control you or harms you. Answering better isn't your job then, and this article can't help with it.
Where do the words react and respond come from?
Merriam-Webster traces react, by way of New Latin, to the Latin re and agere, "to act". It traces respond to the Latin respondēre, "to promise in return, answer". Both open with the prefix re, which the same dictionary defines as "again" or "back".
I like to read react with the again in it. A reaction is something you've done before, done once more. Say someone questions you in front of others, and out comes the tone you've used on questioners for years. Respond has an answer in it, and an answer needs someone there to give it.
So the difference isn't speed. A good response can take a second. A reaction can take a week to arrive, as a long silence or a chilly email. The difference lies in who's answering.
If who's answering has caught your interest, the free Who Am I? masterclass is named after a near relation of it. GIFT26, entered at checkout, makes it free. The third of its three layers is guided. If the world, or you yourself, has ever seemed not quite real, or you're under treatment for that, check that layer with your doctor beforehand, or go without it. And anyone may end it early, open their eyes, take in the room around them and ring a trusted friend. Receive the Masterclass, or read on.
What makes a reply turn into a reaction?
Use, very often. A reply that has been given many times no longer needs thinking up. The words, the tone and the speed are all ready, and any moment that resembles the old ones can draw them out.
Most of those replies earned their place somewhere. A clipped tone that got a late delivery sorted. A joke that took the strain out of an awkward dinner. A curt message that closed a conversation nobody wanted. Each worked well enough to be used again, and after enough uses it turns up in places it was never meant for.
For many people, a reaction is just that: a reply given so often that it comes out on its own. Oswin's neighbour asked for consideration in a tone that, to his ear, sounded like a reprimand, and he had a reply that fitted that tone, worn smooth by use.
There's nothing to condemn in any of this. A reply you collected somewhere is a layer, laid over the person who uses it, not a defect in them. You are not broken. You are buried.
If your quick replies tend to come out defensive, the guard behind them is the subject of always feeling the need to protect yourself. Why the same reply keeps coming round is in why do I keep repeating the same patterns.
Does pausing before you reply actually help?
It can, and a pause is worth having in itself.
Everyone has their own. Some breathe out slowly. Some fetch some water, walk to the window, or turn the phone over on the counter. Keep whichever ones work for you. None of them has to lead anywhere else to be worth doing.
Pausing is one way of staying with the moment you're actually in, and how to be present is about that in its own right.
What follows is a small exercise for ordinary friction. It's an everyday exercise, not a treatment for anything, so if you have a doctor or therapist, stay with them. It isn't meant for reactions that hurt anyone, you included. If yours involve harming yourself or someone else, drinking or using drugs to get through, or fear of what you might do, book in with your doctor, or with a trained professional, first, and if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services. Keep partners and family out of it too. It's for colleagues, neighbours, shared groups and strangers, and never for anyone who frightens or hurts you.
What's one way to practise responding?
Try a holding line. It takes a few minutes now, while nothing is going on, and somewhere to keep it, such as a draft message to yourself.
- Make up one holding line in your own words. A short, true sentence you could say or type to almost anyone at work or in your building. For example: "I want to answer that properly, so let me reply this afternoon." Keep it where you'll find it.
- Decide who it's for. Colleagues, neighbours, a residents' group or a club chat, a stranger in a queue. Not a partner, not family, and never someone who frightens or hurts you.
- Use it, then come back. When a reply comes up hard, say or send the holding line and nothing else for now. You haven't swallowed anything; you've booked yourself a later answer. When you return, write the reply you'd give now, and send that one.
Any time it leaves you shaken, leave the holding line alone, for now or for good, and talk it through with a counsellor, your doctor or a good friend.
Should you try the Who Am I? masterclass?
The question in its title, who you are, sits close to who answers. These three would point towards it.
- You've had moments of stillness and wondered what they were. The page speaks to anyone who has had "flashes where everything stopped and something vast and quiet was simply there", and who wants "to understand what they were."
- Belief isn't asked of you. Of its guided part, the page says simply: "no belief required".
- Stillness feels possible, and so does stopping. What the guided part needs, according to the page, is "willingness to be still". People who have felt detached from themselves, or found the world strangely unreal, or whose doctor is treating them for it, should check with that doctor first or give that part up. And at any point, anyone can stop there, look around them, notice the ground beneath their feet and call a person they can count on.
On the page, GIFT26 turns "USD 297" into "Yours free". The page lists three layers, starting with "The complete written guide" and "Robert's full narrated video", with the guided layer last.
I'd always rather be answered than reacted to.
One entry in the RS Method's records belongs to a lawyer: years of internal conflict resolved in minutes through a deep identity shift.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. Oswin's last reply, the one he meant, took him a while to find. Receive the Masterclass if you're curious who did the finding.