The Rope

VII.
The Sixth no sooner had begun
    About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
    That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
    Is very like a rope!"

It's strange that as much as effective communication is really the basis of all human relationships, it can really be a difficult prospect. I mean, sure, we're all supposedly speaking Japanese, but I don't think I'm the only one who's ever had the feeling that we might as well all be speaking different languages from one another what with the way we can seem to talk right past each other. We all want to find a way to bridge the disconnect between ourselves and others, but closing up that emotional distance can sometimes seem such a daunting task that it's more of a dream than reality.

Words can be so elusive, and can often fall short of what we may be actually thinking in our minds. It's hard enough to put together words to form sentences here with the leisure of writing on a computer at my own pace, but when one adds to that the challenge of speaking off-the-cuff to someone face-to-face in real time? That's some real pressure. Not only is it hard, but you have to face the fact that when speaking in real time, you might pop out the wrong thing, and find that your words cannot be taken back, as much as you might want to do so. Words can heal, but they can hurt, too.

That's why choosing words is not a simple challenge, but an important one. The fate of a relationship could hang on the difference between a sentence with the word "me" and the word "us" while both sentences may have been meant to express the very same concept. When you said "us", did you mean you and me, or did you mean you and some other person? If you meant you and me, do you really have the right to speak for me when apparently I can barely speak for myself? Confusion like that hopefully is more likely to make us laugh than cry, but it could go either way, couldn't it?

And that's just for those of us with no unusual impediment to our communication skills. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to manage effective communication with the loss of either sight or hearing. A large portion of our communication is non-verbal body language, and I've heard that as much as people sometimes talk about lip reading, it's difficult to the point of near-impossibility for deaf people to learn how to communicate with hearing people who don't know sign language. The way that I sometimes think about how horrible it is that we never truly connect completely with another person, I don't think I could fathom being completely shut off from a large portion of the world around me due to a barrier like that.

But then maybe that barrier is no more or less profound than the barrier that exists between our brains and our mouths. Just trying to make it possible to let someone inside our personal world when our minds' thoughts are a microcosm of abstract concepts that words only barely approach is huge in itself. Or did I already say that? Ugh, I think it's particularly difficult to express this idea in words when the idea is that words often do not suffice to express the things we really mean. If I could express it satisfactorily, I'd probably prove my point to be wrong.

While of course we all can feel confident that our thoughts are our own, many of us may feel that life would be better if we could have someone who could understand us so completely that they didn't have to ask us questions that we could never seem to find the right answers to. The almost constant lack of understanding could possibly be the loneliest thing there is, knowing that nobody can ever express their true feelings so that others understand.

But do we give up trying to communicate because of this futility? Of course not, and I think that's why there such a thing as "uncomfortable silence"; if two people are in the midst of conversing, and suddenly find it difficult to continue speaking, usually that silence is far worse than the spoken awkwardness. We know we should be trying to speak, even if we don't know what to say, because otherwise, how will we know anything of each other at all?