Karen Restivo
In Other Words...
We live in an age of relentless transmission.
Emails ping.
Texts stack up.
Voicemails blink their impatient little lights.
We pitch our thoughts out into the world like seasoned quarterbacks, and in the same breath, we’re catching what everyone else is throwing.
It’s a beautiful, chaotic game of catch and most of us are playing it without ever stopping to read the jersey we’re wearing.
Here’s what nobody tells you: we are human billboards.
Every single day, whether we’ve given our consent or not, we are broadcasting.
Not just through our words, but through our choices, our habits, our company, our reactions - even our silences.
We are, at every moment, authoring a story that others are actively reading.
Spiritual writer Raymont Anderson captures this perfectly in his essay “What’s My Message,” recounting the now-legendary moment a reporter caught Gandhi boarding a train and asked him for a message to the people.
Gandhi’s reply was characteristically unhurried and utterly devastating in its simplicity:
My life is my message.
Sit with that for a moment.
Anderson goes on to note that each of our lives communicates - overtly and covertly - what we truly think, feel, and believe.
Not what we say we believe. What we live.
The places we frequent, the habits we protect, the people we prioritize - these are our sentences and paragraphs, assembled daily into a book that the world reads without waiting for our permission to publish.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: if your life were a book on the shelf right now, what genre would it be?
A gripping story of resilience and purpose?
Or perhaps something closer to a melodrama, heavy with recurring plotlines you keep promising yourself you’ll resolve?
Maybe a horror story with a villain you’ve been blaming for chapters on end?
No judgment here.
Most of us, if we’re honest, have a few chapters we’d quietly like to recall from circulation.
The good news is that this manuscript is not finished.
The draft is still on the table.
Edits are not only possible, they are always available to us, right up until our final page.
The question Anderson leaves us with is both gracious and galvanizing: Is it time to change the genre of your bestseller?
We get one life. One story.
One message walking around in the world wearing our face and our name.
Gandhi understood that his message wasn’t something he delivered - it was something he became.
In other words, that’s the invitation for all of us - not to craft a more impressive caption for the highlight reel, but to author a life so aligned with our deepest values that the message takes care of itself.
Like the well-known adage, “Actions speak louder than words,” we must ask ourselves what are we living?
What are we saying without ever saying a word?
Karenrestivo57@gmail.com