The Moment Their Eyes Go

Hannah can see it happen and she has never once managed to do the right thing in the second afterwards.

It is very specific. There is a moment, usually between sixty and ninety seconds into an explanation, where a person's eyes change. They do not glaze exactly. It is subtler: the focus moves about a foot behind her head, and the nodding becomes regular in a way it was not before, and everything polite stays perfectly in place.

She spots it every time. She is not oblivious and she has been doing this for a long time.

And what she does next is always the same, and she has never chosen it.

She adds.

She adds an example. She adds a clarification. She backs up and comes at it from a different angle, and she says sorry, let me put that another way, and then she puts it another way at slightly greater length.

Which means that at the precise moment somebody has run out of room, she gives them more.

She worked this out at her own kitchen table with a friend who had asked her something ordinary and who was, by minute three, doing the polite nodding, and Hannah heard herself say let me back up and physically stopped in the middle of the sentence.

Her friend laughed and said what, and Hannah said nothing, and then said: I was about to make that longer.

You have your own version. You see the moment, you have always seen the moment, and there is one thing you do next and it has never once worked.

Nobody here is going to tell you to explain less well. Your examples are good and your other angles are often exactly right.

But adding is the wrong direction at that particular second, and there is a proverb about why.

The praise is for fitness, not for volume

There is a proverb about speech that is almost always quoted for its beauty, and the operative word in it is not the gold.

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.Proverbs 25:11

Fitly. Suited. Matched to its moment.

It is not a proverb about eloquence and it is not about how much you say. It is about fit, which means the same words can be gold in one second and nothing at all in the next, and the difference is not in the words.

And the image is a set piece: something small and precious, in a setting made for it. The setting is doing half the work. Take the apples out of the silver and you have some apples.

Which is exactly what happens when Hannah adds at minute three. The material is the same quality it was at minute one. The setting has gone.

And the value of what you say is partly in its moment. That is not my aestheticising: the written word makes fitness the thing being praised, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who stopped mid-sentence at her own table.

And nothing here says your words are not gold. The proverb calls them apples of gold, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold the quality of their own material without assuming that quality alone carries it.

Why adding is the reflex, and what it is actually doing

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth knowing because it is not laziness or ego.

When somebody's eyes go, the honest reading is: they are full.

But the reading that arrives first, in about a fifth of a second, is: they have not got it.

Those are completely different diagnoses and they call for opposite responses. Not got it calls for more. Full calls for less, or for stopping.

And a good teacher's whole training pushes toward the first reading, because a good teacher is somebody who has spent years learning to find another way in when the first one fails. That instinct is a genuine strength, and at this particular second it fires wrongly, and it fires fast enough that there is no gap for thinking.

So Hannah is not making a mistake in judgement. She is running an excellent instinct at the one moment it does the opposite of what she wants.

And your instinct is not the problem. The word says a wise man will hear, and will increase learning, and it commends the labor of getting better at this, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person keep a strength while correcting its timing.

And you are able to read a room accurately. The word says the Spirit searcheth all things, and He has been given to you, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the reading rather than leaving it to a skill that fails under pressure.

Nobody is telling you to stop explaining

I want that plain, because this could easily become a rule about being brief with everybody.

You will need the examples. You will need the other angle. Most of the time when somebody has not got it, more is exactly right, and a teacher who has been frightened out of adding will leave people stranded.

The distinction is the whole thing, and it is available: not got it looks like effort, and full looks like politeness.

A person who has not got it leans in slightly and their face works. A person who is full is perfectly pleasant, nodding on a regular beat, focused a foot behind you.

Hannah can tell the difference and always could. She has simply never had a move for the second one.

And there is a move. It is stopping, and asking, or stopping and stopping. The word says be swift to hear, slow to speak, and it puts the hearing first, and the Spirit is the one who makes that possible at a second when everything in you is loaded to talk.