Selective semi-listening. Fading in and
out of the conversation. Attention-divided syndrome. Texting while
talking. Missing the point. Ignorance-bliss. Even not paying
attention to your own words when you are the one speaking them.
"Is that my mobile ringing?"
“Were you just saying saying
something about something?”
I propose a new verb: keywording. = to
only notice a few key words in someone’s spoken sentence. Eg.”Are
you keywording me?” [ie. Are you only half-hearing me?]
Politicians and PR people have been
doing a similar thing (but intentionally) in the media for years:
answering the question that they want to answer rather than the one
that has actually been asked.
It is becoming just as common in daily
life to go about keywording eachother. The best laid ideas can just
float away unheeded.
When we stop paying genuine attention
to each we stop paying attention to the words used by those who
govern us. So when we hear the word "austerity" we accept
it instead of realising what it really means: our elected
representatives selling parts of public hospitals to private
comapnies so they can profit from our illness. We hear the words
"budgetary responsibility" and we don't stop to think that
it means continuing to allow tax evasion for the richest and their
businesses while public servants salaries are slashed.
As George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) the
Irish playwright and essayist once wrote, ""The problem
with communication is the illusion that it has occurred."
Re-reading the great Primo Levi’s
“The Reawakening” a while ago I was reminded like a glass of ice
water in the face that we have this human need to be understood. And
when I say ‘understood’ I don’t just mean comprehended through
language. I mean in an empathetic sense of the word: to be heard, to
be understood well, and to be recognized as speaking important truths
– important because they are human experiences that must be felt
and genuinely identified with, by fellow humans.
My own struggles with communicating in
a second language are tiny compared to Levi’s fear that his
accounts of his year in Auschwitz’s Nazi concentration camp would
be ignored or not believed.
But I want to
live my life (and hope others will too) with Terentius’ maxim of:
Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. In…
English: I am a human being, so nothing
human is strange to me.
Catalan: Sóc un ésser humà; això fa
que rés humà em sigui aliè.
Castilian Spanish: Hombre soy, nada
humano me es ajeno.
In other words, a great variety of
human experience always has at least something that we can relate to.
Live as a good listener and a verbaliser because that is the ideal
for full and best communication, I try to regularly tell myself. I
know this has been one of the strongest mutual reasons for my
relationship with my partner (wife) enduring and thriving for more
than twenty years.
[This article was first published in
Catalonia Today
magazine, December 2015.]
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