Sitting high above the clouds on an immense plane headed far east to Shanghai, realizing the difficulty of spending 14 hour enroute with no technical devices to contact my work or friends, I twitch and turn with issues heavy on my mind. With the weight of several life changing events on my soul, I consider the importance of our communication with one another.
Foggy communiqué, unclear thoughts or a lack of transparency is like navigation in the dark, it’s hard to find your baring when you have no light or map, light being the ideas expressed and the map our words. Or, a voice stuck in the back of a throat, our fifth chakra, might indicate a fear of speaking up and which is, of course, difficult to make out, certainly on a cell phone.
I’ve had some real communication ‘snafus’ of late, with employees, loved ones and another so dire that it ended what I hoped might be a romantic relationship which weathered the one year mark. It didn’t. I had to make a difficult ‘macaroni and cheese’ decision, (reference previous blog, ‘Cornbread and Casseroles), an excruciatingly difficult decision and big step for me in honoring what I need. The sting remains.
My boy Bert...a special boy!
So how DO we bore down to the meat (food again), of what needs to be expressed in any given situation. Yes, it’s different for everyone. I spend time with words and relish dissection of events that happen, much like a post mortem after a stage production. My mother and I used to review each show of mine, how the audience responded, did they ‘get’ a certain scene, lost in others, what was the real meaning behind comments made back stage?
It’s no wonder, I consider, that we misunderstand one another, verbally but certainly with email and texting being a much used and often abbreviated version of what might be the ‘full story’. Communication is the response we get. When all is said and done, I endeavor to focus on the love that remains, and thank heaven for the fine people and creatures who come into my life, teaching me so much about compassion, for myself and everyone else hanging out on the planet!!
Not everyone is savvy or passionate about the construction of a sentence to reveal an intent, or diction to allow one to be better heard. I think of my dogs and how we spoke our own language together, and with my Bert, (who sadly passed last Tuesday, a month after his brother), the importance of gestures, foot thumps and facial expressions, as his hearing was completely gone.
My boy Bert was named ‘the gift giver’. He relished finding a stuffed animal in his basket, (we called them ‘bunnies) and when I’d return from work, or just enter from another room, he’d greet me with a gift, a ‘bunny’. His gesture spoke volumes. I so deeply miss his physical ‘self’ in my world, though the essence of his grand spirit remains. Is it no irony that ‘dog’ spelled backwards is ‘god’. Might we all communicate with as much clarity as we can muster and look for the God in one another!
By BB Webb