READ BEFORE YOU COMMENT

When I read your posts, I try to give them the attention they deserve. I try not to let certain words slip past me, because sometimes that is exactly where something is hiding that helps me understand the whole piece. Of course, I do this at my own pace.

Looking at the posts I’ve just read, I realized I’ve moved through very different territories: love, fear, personal boundaries, family memory, presence, spiritual seeking, identity, responsibility.

And almost every time, I’ve tried to find a point within the text that the author had opened without necessarily developing it all the way.

That alone makes me imagine the effort behind the writing.

Perhaps this is what matters most to me when I leave a comment. Not simply writing “beautiful post, this resonated with me,” and not trying to summarize in a few words what someone may have spent time, thought, and perhaps a part of their life writing.

I try to give something back.

Something that leaves a small trace, taking the best of what that post, in that moment, was giving me.

In one, for example, I found myself inside the paradox of not seeking, which can itself become another form of seeking. I had never thought about that before.

In another, the deeper problem wasn’t simply a man’s behavior, but his attempt to replace another person’s will with his own interpretation of it.

With a completely different post, I moved from fear itself to the kind of fear that changes our relationship with time. And I have to say, realizing that was quite interesting.

Then there are posts that begin by telling us about a geographical journey and, almost without our noticing, transform it into the possibility of meeting someone through the landscape they once inhabited.

And I find that wonderful.

These are completely different movements.

Perhaps that is also why I find it strange when someone leaves fifty comments that, with two nouns changed, somehow all seem to be the same comment. There is something paradoxical about that to me: if every author has given us something different, how can we give everyone the same response?

There is something else I care about.

When I comment on someone else’s post, I don’t want to prove how intelligent I am.

The comment should remain secondary to the author. It can add a perspective, open a small door, perhaps notice something from another angle, but it should never take the stage away from them.

Otherwise, we risk taking the soul away from the very person who wrote the page.

Over time, I think I’ve found a measure that feels like mine: to go deep enough to leave something behind, to be brief enough to remain a comment, and to stay close enough to the text that one very simple thing becomes clear:

that post was truly read.

Perhaps the rule I want to keep is simply this:

Don’t comment on the theme.
Find the living point in the text
and enter into dialogue with it.

At least then, the encounter becomes more real.

And perhaps more meaningful to the person reading, too.

— Antonio Castellaneta

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