Conversation is Food for the Soul

Conversation is Food for the Soul  (fortune cookie)

The topic of conversation has been on my mind a lot lately. Work, family, church, friends  have all presented challenges in communication beyond the ordinary. The most heart rending of these has been, that after feeling frustrated for months that someone very dear to me had not been returning phone calls or answering emails but rather sporadically and answering only the most superficial of the questions I had about our friendship/relationship, I stopped trying so hard myself to "get through", to ask for an audience. I wish I had not done that. I found out in a very indirect way that the nature of that relationship had changed -- and not in my favor. After months of knowing it was slipping away I wasn't surprised, although I was hurt that I had to find out the way I did.

Trying very hard to not judge harshly, I tried to look at it from my friend's perspective. Where I had messed up I 'fessed up, repeating things I had said before during the previous months. Still no response. I feel my friend is at their core a fair person, not given to pettiness or callousness over the feelings of others. So I reason that it is I who am missing something. I know what efforts I had already made and where I could have been wiser. But I felt myself stymied by the breakdown in communication.

Yesterday I stumbled upon this quote, which ties in very nicely with the fortune cookie slip I pulled out of my quotes jar for today's post:

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." 
--George Bernard Shaw 

Sometimes I need to be smacked upside the head before I "get" things. After all that time of wondering, and trying to be "fair" and "patient" and not to blame, I realized there wasn't any real blame to be had.

 Despite the fact that both my friend and I believe communication to be vital to any relationship, from friendship to romance to family to work, neighbors, etc -- despite that, our communication styles are quite different. I thought I was communicating my thoughts and feelings well, and attributed the silence to processing time or the need for space, etc -- any number of things save what I now am going out on a limb guessing was the real problem: we were both under the illusion that we had effectively communicated. I feel safe in this guess  because I went back over in my mind to see what I'd missed and what I hadn't, and found it about 50-50.

Time heals wounds, and true friendship (which is at the heart of all healthy relationships including familial and romantic) survives. I hope this is a true friendship. Even so, communication styles will always be as unique as the person who owns them, and some simply mesh better than others. I am blessed with some friendships that although our styles are different, the conversation is always "food for the soul", and in fact is always a veritable feast. I think our world teaches us to expect the other person to listen and understand and respond in a manner both timely and appropriately (and we decide what constitutes being appropriate, not allowing the other person to). And so we are disappointed. Even wounded. Intellectually we know those we love would not deliberately hurt us. Emotionally we only understand that we hurt. And I think then we exacerbate the situation -- and the hurt -- by then withholding further attempts at communication. Certainly we cannot force someone to see things our way, but how sad is it that we punish them, even indirectly, for being as inept at revealing themselves as we are ourselves?

Communication encompasses more than conversation, but I think it begins there. the little things, which we often discount as moot or even superficial, do count. There is time and place for the serious and deep, but those little discussions about the weather and literature, the commonalities, the humorous, those are the things, which for me at least put me at ease and cause my trust in a person to deepen to the point where the serious and the difficult and hard and painful can be discussed, where patience can abide -- but also courage, for patience can give permission to avoid an issue if that patience isn't accompanied by the courage to say, "Hey, my soul is hungry right now -- can we talk?"