Communication

It’s difficult, at times, to know what to write. It’s even more difficult to do it in a way that will communicate what I intended to say appropriately. This thing called communication is something that I have yet to be able to put my finger on, even though I’ve been trying it out for nigh on to sixty years or so.
As an example, today we stopped by a local Quick-Trip type place to get gas and pick up some hamburger buns for the sloppy joes we were having for lunch. I got the gas, then went into the store to pick up the buns. They were out. I came back out to the car with a loaf of bread and some chips.
As I got into the car, I said to my wife something to the effect that they were out of hamburger buns. We then had, over the next 10 minutes, a disjointed sort of conversation about hamburger buns, sloppy joes, and why didn’t I go on down to Dillons and get buns. Turns out that we were on two different wavelengths. I said that I told her as I got into the car that we were out of buns, and carried on my end of the conversation as if she had that information. She tells me that she never heard me say that, and only found out that we had no buns later on in the conversation; she was conversing from the idea that the buns were in the sack that I carried out of the store.
No wonder that the conversation didn’t seem to make much sense to me. No wonder we both got frustrated in trying to communicate with the other one. No wonder that the end result was less than satisfying.
I don’t know if I said what I thought I said as I got into the car or not. In my mind, I can hear myself clearly as I slid into the seat. I suspect that in her mind, that scene is playing out much differently. Which one of us is right? We’ll never know, and it really doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that we learn from the experience and continue in our efforts to better communicate with one another as we hurtle down the road of life at what seems to be an ever-increasing speed. What matters is that we don’t give up on each other or just shrug our shoulders and say “whatever” when things become difficult.
As an aside, this episode points out to me the incredible thought that has gone into the writing of Jewish and Christian scripture. And even at that, the Bible is interpreted in just about as many different ways as there are people who offer interpretation, simply because everyone sees things differently, and everyone has a slightly different world view from which they operate. Is it any wonder that there are literally hundreds of commentaries…thousands of books…tens of thousands of people who offer up vastly differing ideas on what was meant by this passage, why this saying is in the Bible, or what Paul (or John or David or Luke or…) meant when he wrote whatever it was he wrote.
Yet to bring out from that cacophony of voices a religion that has as its basic tenets things that on which by far most of the Christians can agree is nothing short of amazing. And to make those tenets understandable by most of the world’s population (when heard or read in one’s language of understanding) is even more amazing.
Communication is the elephant in the room that no one wants to recognize, sometimes. Yet unless we do, we are bound to wallow around in ignorance and misunderstanding at a minimum, and possibly hostility and outright anger or hatred as a not uncommon result.