As a former English teacher, I’ve spent years disrespecting the word mostly.
My distaste started when a professor insisted the word was an enemy of concise language and deserved elimination from the English vocabulary. According to him, mostly added nothing to a sentence’s meaning. He even offered examples. My kids behaved at dinner … or they didn’t. I burned the chicken … or I didn’t. August is hot as Hades … or it isn’t. There is no mostly behaved, burned, or hot; there is no in between.
Young at the time, I blindly accepted (and eventually taught others to accept) this black and white mindset that snubbed mostly as fluff.
But now, well, I’ve changed my mind.
Call it a mid-life rebellion against the hard and fast rules of my youth, but as we approach a new school year, I’m even offering mostly as this year’s go-to-gal of a word.
Why?
Because I think we need her.
We live in a social media age that not only exposes everyone’s mistakes from cradle to grave but also trains us to notice the faults that surround us — to the point nothing lives up to our expectations. Traffic doesn’t move fast enough, our food is mediocre, our friends or family let us down.
For parents such as myself, it’s an unforgiving mentality that can easily spill over into the school setting, where we’ll inevitably encounter a blunder or two. It might be a child who acts foolishly, a teacher who says the wrong thing, a coach who comes down too hard, a parent who crosses a boundary, a school friend who falls short, or simply a school decision we don’t like. And if we only listen to our culture, we might be tempted to let a singular mistake define someone or something’s overall worth to us.
But mostly helps us avoid that.
I was convinced of this after listening to an attorney friend deliver a farewell speech to his law firm colleagues after many years of working with them. He had surely encountered challenging people and situations, but by the time he left, he mentioned none of it. Instead, he recounted only his fondest memories with his firm and shared the advice he had received as a young man: “You will know you have been fortunate to experience a good place and good people if you reflect back and see they got things mostly right.”
Mostly.
It was then I really “saw” that beauty of a word. And she wasn’t the throw-away, fluffy word my professor suggested. Instead, she was a wise guide in a world where unrealistic expectations for perfection can blind our ability to appreciate the overall good someone or something adds to our lives.
Maybe our child does act irresponsibly this school year, but does our child mostly act responsibly? Maybe a teacher does make an insensitive remark, but does that teacher mostly show sensitivity? Maybe a friend does hurt a peer’s feelings, but is that friend mostly kind and generous? Maybe we don’t like a school decision, but does that school mostly act in our child’s best interest? Before we forget our blessings, mostly reminds us we still have them.
This not to say that parents have no room to complain when life is mostly heading in the right direction. There’s always room for improvement, and I’m sure people worth their weight would agree. It’s simply to say we don’t have to let our complaints cloud and taint the bigger (and often much brighter) picture.
So, this school year, consider letting my gal mostly help navigate the ups and downs you encounter, because I think she will do what my former black and white approach never could: make it mostly wonderful.
