 |
| Passby |
Perhaps this sounds banal to you. Maybe it’s a truth you’ve always held, but I find, now that it’s revealed, that I never believed it. We think we speak each others’ language. But we don’t.
It is very difficult to communicate truth so that someone else can hear it. Next to impossible. But we think we do it every day. We think everything we read, everything we hear, accumulated, amounts to what we call understanding. We think the words we say mean the same thing to the person beside us.
I remember as a child, learning that everyone sees colour in their own way. I was fascinated by the idea that what I saw as blue, someone else might see as what I might call a similar shade/grade of purple, and yet by agreement, whenever this colour appeared, we both called that “blue.”
How much does this happen when we say love, like, hate, wish, disappoint, worry, wonder, help, ask, brave, join, community, feedback, input, mother, father, wife, husband, good, bad, trust?
And we think we know each other? Well enough to judge, make decisions about, dismiss or accept as worthy?
We haven’t begun.
Yet, we can know each other, maybe only beyond the language that confuses us about each others' meaning, when we try to teach each other what our words mean to us, through what we do. And we can love each other without ever understanding a word.
(my question for today: what do I feed?)
This month, this blog will also appear at http://holdonhope.ca/timeless/blog/ - check out Timeless!
