Communication, Revisited

What is communication?

This is the basis of civilization, and the foundation for all human interactions. Life exists as it does today because of the effectiveness of our developed abilities to share ideas, perceptions, and emotions between people. Think about it, how can you build a house without communicating? How can ideas spread, and what education without language? Everything that involves more than one person involves communication, but yet it can still be so obscure.

While we have learned to convey the vast majority of messages amongst individuals, there are still areas in which there lies great room for improvement, and that would involve just about every communication that involves people who have emotions. Last I checked, that didn't leave anyone out of this issue. The thing is, as I mentioned before, communication crosses through filters that modify the original content into a message for the listener. This is not always good. Oftentimes it is beneficial, because it converts information coming from one person into a form that the second person can hear, but in the instances where those two messages differ, there lies the potential for conflict.

Interpretations are frequent roots of quarrels, as they relate information present with assumptions that may or may not be valid. Interpretations are not always bad, for example if I say “Meet me at two at the train station”, it would be fairly safe to assume that I mean two in the afternoon, not in the morning, unless there are other indications in the conversation that indicate otherwise. Such an assumption could save a lot of hassle, so you don’t end up wasting a few hours of the night waiting for a non-existent train to arrive.

Many times, though, this is not the case, and assumptions can get you in trouble. Many times, though, they tend to reflect the receiver more than they do the communicator. This is because it is entirely up to the receiver to make sense of the messages he or she received, and this may require supplemental information that the speaker failed to provide. So, as a result, someone may take meaning from glances, gestures, and inflictions that are simply done without any meaning or thought. And many times, a failure to act in a certain way is also received as a communication, not one that was not intended.

The key to this mess lies in distinguishing information that arrived via assumptions versus that which arrived via direct intentional language. Being able to discern the two can help someone know when to trust what they know, or when to acknowledge a certain room for error in their understanding. If it were easier to think of one’s self as being wrong, many disagreements would be avoided.

But since when is that easy?

Communication

Now this is what makes communication so strange: it doesn’t work in the sense that I can communicate my idea into your understanding. That is not how it happens. Instead, through the two disconnects, there is my struggle to articulate my ideas, to put them out into the airwaves for your collection. It requires both a sense of transparency that is hard to come by and a talent for converting a felt impression into communicable language.

From there, the thought is beyond the speaker, and it is in the hands of the listener. Now this is no simple reconversion of words into thoughts, but of images into ideas. Because, you see, when we take in words, be they written, spoken, signed, we don’t take them by themselves. If that were to be true, then they would be meaningless, as they would have no context, no significance, no relevance, and not even a hint of importance to them. No, when the waves propagate through the air and hit our eardrums, before they reach our consciousness, even, they must be made meaningful. They are translated from high-low pressure regions into thoughts, but not without the contamination of preconceptions, visual cues, or vocal inflections that may indicate anything other than exactly what is said. These things are all jumbled up together in the resulting idea that pops out as what we “heard”.

This is what makes communication so difficult, because in order to speak we must be transparent, and in order to listen we must see our own opaqueness.

This brings me to my example. Through an exchanging of words, I managed to make someone very angry with me. From her perspective, I couldn’t see where she was coming from, and the ensuing communications merely compounded the original infraction. The problem was the limiting capabilities of texting. While they are great for sharing information, they do a lousy job of sharing anything more complex than the time. I was struggling to express my perspective through a means that only shared words, nothing more, and words are easily misinterpreted. (“Why don’t you get out of here?” can mean more than one thing based on the tone in which it is said.) So I sat there, struggling to communicate that I understood what she was going through. And whether or not I was correct in my evaluation of her state, I had no way of telling her what I meant. Take it that I actually did understand, and imagine me telling her using nothing but black and white text that idea right there. It could not conceivably be interpreted correctly; she was already mad at me and had prior knowledge of me not understanding her circumstances. What are the messaged words “I know what you mean” going to do when I am up against the facts of my historical ineptitude and her emotions of feeling like I can’t possibly know, even if it was explained to me very clearly.

I like to think about what can and what cannot be communicated through the traditional means, and what I can do to remedy the miscommunications that frequent our lives. The only thing I have come up with is understanding things the first time around and then never messing up. Well, we’ll see how that works.

Religion

Religion is a funny subject. I have been consciously been avoiding the topic to this point in all of my scheming in regards to my Meaning. I felt like I had it all figured out except for this little thing called God.

That was unfortunate, but I figured God would find His place in my ideals eventually, so I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t worried until I finally took a step back and critically examined my religious beliefs; then I was terrified.

See, instead of seeing what I was hoping to see – the good Christian boy I grew up knowing – I identified my questions and qualms with the church. I was not comfortable saying what I did and did not believe; instead, I only saw what I did not believe. And that was shocking.

Doubts are inherent in everything I conceive, but I did not leave room for the magnitude of doubts I was dealing with in my religious views. And that was crippling, and I felt like my world had fallen apart around me. If these thoughts aren’t solidified, then what can I have an unbreakable belief in if not in religion? And that made its way to my head and intruded on everything I did.

It took me a while, and some deal of outside help, to realize that I didn’t need to have the solution to my doubts. In fact, I didn’t even have to be able to conceive of a way to even ever dispel my beliefs.

It is the question that drives me, not the uncertainty that kills me.

Life's Questions

I haven't posted in a while because I felt like I was dealing with issues that I didn’t have answers to, and as a result I didn’t have anything to share. If I didn’t have solutions, then why would I post?

I now realize that this isn’t about the answers. Life is about the questions and how we relate to things that we don’t know what to think about. I’ve realized that I have more questions that I could possibly find answers to, and to hold up my life every time a big question came around that sent my thoughts into a tailspin would be completely absurd. As much as I would love to know the solutions to everything I may ever encounter, I now understand that such a request is lucrative. Hence, I acknowledge my passion for questions.

I love questions. I like answers, but I love good, insightful, stride-stopping questions that intercede in the progression of life.

Now, I just have to be comfortable with the knowledge that I am ignorant to matters of such enormity as religion and ethics. Whereas I’d love to step in and say that I’ve got it all figured out, I clearly don’t, and the humor of my persistent belief in my abilities still catches me.

I want to know the truth about the presence of God, but as I recently identified, the place for me to start is to settle for knowing that which I believe, and that which I can take by faith. Once I know where I stand, I can proceed with grappling and contemplating where my beliefs will take me.

So, at least for now, my life is about questions. Not answers, and I don’t need to hear any so-called “truths”, but I live with the questions, and let wonder fill my mind as I consider this world we inhabit.

And as one last thought for you to put in your blender and take for a spin: What holds value, and why?