0062367633 (N) by Elizabeth Lesser

Author:Elizabeth Lesser [Lesser, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

THE WORD

I DON’T MEAN TO SAY that every conversation we have must be deep and meaningful. God forbid. I’m all for harmless gossip and funny repartee, debate and argument. I engage in my fair share of unrehearsed confrontations, rants, jokes, and off-the-cuff running of the mouth. These kinds of communication are part of the repertoire; they make us human. But if they are the only ways we reach out to each other, we betray the power of language, which has the capacity to connect us soul to soul. We would be wise to remember the deeper language, because without it, we make such a mess of our shared lives, telling old, worn-out stories or using words as weapons or as ways to hide. How you use your words matters.

Human beings began talking to each other fifty thousand years ago. I like to imagine those early conversations—a small band of people motioning and grunting around a fire, or pointing at the stars, or laughing at an early attempt at a joke. Giving names to things, alerting each other to danger, expressing pleasure, teaching, complaining, arguing, and evolving the species into Planet Earth’s great communicators—masters of poetry and polemics, oratory and talk shows.

But still, we barely know how to say what we really mean. I sit across the table from my husband, this man I have lived with for almost thirty years. Inside my head a cauldron of thoughts bubble and brew. My heart is alive with changing feelings, at one moment loving, at the next petty. I try to find words to carry the thoughts and feelings out of myself on a boat of language, and sail them into my husband’s harbor, where we can commune and experience our differences and our oneness. The words form, they come out of me, they float across the dinner table, and they land at my husband’s port of call. Sometimes they come close to expressing what I want to say, sometimes he hears them as I meant them, but quite often the words I wrap around my innards might as well be the grunts of the first humans.

How is it that fifty thousand years later humans are still learning to talk to each other? The problem isn’t just our clunky way with words or our lack of listening. The bigger problem is that we are speaking from the surface of our self to the surface of the other person’s self. From one reptile brain to another. From one ego to another ego. Reptiles and egos defend or attack. When language is sourced from the surface, our words add to the general confusion of the world. How could they not? Our shallow thoughts and feelings are a jumble of desire and love and need, mixed with fear and defense and reactivity. No wonder monks and nuns of all wisdom traditions take vows of silence. One of the first Indian gurus I met was an old man who had not spoken a word since he was twenty.

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