Instigations Towards Communication

The human use of language has evolved to a point of demanding complexity. Whereas at one time, our most abstract needs could be expressed by pointing and half-articulated grunts, we now live and connect through a dynamic network of information and coding.

Our current level of development allows us to convey an amazing degree of intimate thought and feeling. Yet with this ability we have gained an equally amazing capacity for alienation. Ideas can become so involved as to stand between us like giants.

What, then, motivates an individual at this stage of history to face up to the task of communication? The pain of realizing one’s confusion, one’s aimlessness in an ocean of information, would seem to be a powerful deterrent to using language. Why try to reflect one’s inner state in words when the mirror has become clouded?

A specific tree I saw recently comes to mind as one answer to these questions. I was driving around a corner I had passed many times while coming home from errands when I saw it. This time, I stopped my car short. I put it in reverse, accelerated backwards, and stopped where I had a head on view of the tree. It had turned a striking red, and its leaves were dotted with rainwater. It glowed in the light of the setting sun. I sat and stared in pure pleasure for several minutes before continuing home.

Even if I knew I would never succeed in expressing the essence of that experience, I would probably insist on trying to re-create it with words. The power of the tree’s beauty touched me so strongly that it hurt more to contain it within me than it does to express it insufficiently. In these cases, it is less a human choice to speak than it is nature’s choice to speak through you.

Another situation comes to me in response to the question of why we attempt communication amid interpersonal information fog. During an independent study in undergrad, my professor for the course and dean of the college told me she prefers the stress of the school year to having to structure free time in the summer.

I believe her general meaning in this statement can be analogized to the way we use language. We often associate meaning with fullness and activity rather than emptiness and stillness. Therefore, filling the space between two people with words – even absurd words – seems to solve the problem of distance between understandings. There is a pride in the very intention of connection.

In our age of incessant and often conflicting information, I see two key motivators to dive into the struggle with language: one internal, and one external. Both involve a lot of stubbornness.

The first is the desire to expand the small moments of grace that our lives provide. To me, that tree was more than branches and leaves, and I take that as a gift to share with whomever I can. The second is the will to condense the empty spaces around us into understanding. A summer full of solitary awesomeness is less meaningful than an ordinary semester lived out in community.

Drawing these two together is an even greater draw towards communication. It is the need to reveal new, if not authentic, ways of being to each other.