What to Do with Good Communication: See, Hear, Create!

(Mike DePung — Post 25)

Today, I want to make a quick point. Whenever we receive communication, if it’s significant, we have a responsibility to process and respond to it. While it is right and courteous to respond to the one communicating, the most crucial response is deserved by our own hearts. We need to be honest with ourselves, and if we are, we need to ask ourselves how to deal with what we have heard or read. Receive communication. Respond. Do you get it?

Walt Whitman has an incisive observation about the responsibility of readers, which we can extrapolate to listeners. Read this, please:

…the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay — the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

Whitman’s idea that the reader makes sense of the literature for herself or himself means that the reader molds, interprets, and integrates it into life. The communication is not complete until then. Obviously, Whitman implies that literature can be and should be read that way, i.e., the reader creates something beyond the scope or intention of the author. In my thoughts, and I think his, too, that means that we perceive the literature according to our heart and use it to help self grow, refine passions and purposes, achieve the goals of our mission, and see new possibilities. We process the communication — written or oral — according to how it helps us express our heart.

I hope that my former students and present followers know how important I believe it is to ask questions, because questions cause us to process information. Receive communication. Ask questions. Process thoughts. Do you understand? Subject it to our hearts, not our egos. Respond, in some way, respond — hundreds of possibilities. What do you think about Whitman’s take on reading? How do you think I processed what Whitman said?

Here’s to the struggle of receiving communication and creating something wonderful — far beyond what the author or speaker could conceive. Here’s to finding good for our core self in all those messages with which we are deluged every day. Here’s to us moving onward and upward!