On Communication (or: blabbing usefully).

Though I try my best to look at the world with eyes of wonder, there are times in which I get tired. There are days when I simply cannot take certain things, where there seems to be such immense disconnect that I feel as though I am too odd to live well, to do this human thing properly. Because I have a tough time adhering to the rules, I have trouble sticking to the game as it was laid out by others. In every single case, I long to figure out my own ways to do things, because I have difficulty trusting those paved roads that some seem to follow blindly.

There are a few key things that I do believe in, however, and one of them is communication. Every single relationship in my life that has veered towards destruction has done so because of things left unclear. Because there have been times in which I did not know how to lay my thoughts and feelings out to someone else & there have been times in which I did not see the importance of it.
And now that I do know, now that I do understand, I can see clearly how some people have a similarly difficult time understanding that everything in life is about honestly speaking of who we are and what we believe in. Living a life that feels authentic and honestly good cannot be done if we cannot allow ourselves to shine through fully in pretty much every single interaction we have with other human beings. Though it would take a lot of the load off our shoulders — and apparently it may, sometime eerily soon — mind reading isn’t a thing that is accessible to us. And thus we have the obligation to, to our best ability, explain to other people who we are and what we want and how we see the world.

There is not a lot in life that hurts me as much as when people assume things. About me & about other human beings. We are all so eager to judge way too soon about someone’s character, about what we think they are thinking, about how we presume they see the world, that we forget to have an honest and open conversation with them in which we might very well see them in a different light.

I heard in a podcast a couple of weeks back that children under the age of 4 assume that everyone sees the world the way they see it, that everyone understands things in a similar way. This is apparently why they are such terrible little storytellers, for they do not see the need to carefully explain. According to them, we all ought to understand that it is absolutely ludicrous that one would choose a yellow jumper over an orange one, because they know why it is so.
They do not see that our minds are all so intrinsically different that our perceptions vary greatly at all times. The fact that adults are in fact capable of knowing that we don’t all perceive the world in the same way is what distinguishes human beings from all other animals.

But it feels sometimes as if we lose that knowledge. Because we assume that people will fathom our full intentions & we just as easily believe that we understand others perfectly, even when Life has shown us countless times that that is not the case.

And that is why continual clear, honest, open-minded conversation is vital to every single sort of relationship we long to forge with others. For without it, we are living in a lie.