Sunday, February 1, 2015

All the parts

Communication is hard.

Think about all you need to do. You need to figure out what you want to say. You need to think about how to say it. What words to use. Where the emphasis goes; breaks, and pauses, and points of forceful emotions. You need to think about what ideas there are associated with those words; all of them, not just the ones you want. Do you want those? You need to think about ups and downs. And you need to think about other people, what will they do what will they think?

People are confusing.

Do they know the words that I'm wanting to use? Do they have other connotations, other implications, to the phrases than I do? They haven't had my experiences - I know that. Can they understand my explanations, with the feelings that go along - the struggles, the excitement, the fear, the joy - all just from the phrases chosen to express what I'm attempting to convey?

Why are they annoyed? Why are they asking these questions? Why are they saying these things? Why do they act in these ways that make no sense? I want sense. Sense of the world around me. These things these people are doing do not fit in any understanding of the world I have.

Why? Why do they act in these ways? I need to try to figure it out, so that I can try to make them understand what I am trying to say. What I am trying to make them understand of my world, of my thoughts, of my experiences. I need to try to understand how these others think so I can try to make them think what I want them to, for at least the period of time of reading what I say. I need to understand. I need to understand, and how can you understand when you don't have that information, when you're missing pieces, when the pieces you have seem to contradict, when you have too many and too few at the same time?

There are so many parts.

Ideas to words. Words to phrases. Phrases to sentences and paragraphs and more. The pieces need to come together smoothly, the words do, when you're writing. But the ideas need to as well. The way you communicate, the way you shift focus, and emphasize, and the way you draw attention with both the word choice and the structure on the page.

Bits and pieces, all piling up to make something larger. How does it work? We understand it, but can we understand what we want it to be? Are we predicting properly? Are the bits the right bits and the pieces the right pieces? Are our ideas being too tied up in our experiences to be understood?

Letters to words, the page fills. But what do these squiggles mean?

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