[389] Pivot

To even construct a sentence is something of a wonder.

Every adjective, noun, and verb have some relative connotation. Your mind condenses the whole of your experiences into a workable function. Be it the voice in your head or the directions to act, conveying messages is as taken for granted as breathing.

We get to layer our labels! I didn't just tell you something, I declared it. You weren't asking me something, you accused me. Is it any wonder conversations either have to be simple and polite or immediately turn into fights?

I think it's a good habit of communication to avoid and disavow ambiguous language. Granted, inevitably you're going to be talking about something you don't quite understand and haven't found the words for, but there are ways to make that conversation go from being difficult to impossible.

Take the word “soul.” You can find any number of books or websites that advocate for your soul. They'll tell you how to make your soul fulfilled or why your soul is incomplete. They'll say your soul is damaged or it can be saved. I, for one, have no idea what a soul is, even if I'd like to believe I know what they're getting at.

I'd rather empower words that are supposed to mean the same thing. What if we stopped using “soul” and started using all the words that comprise it like “personality,” “well-being,” and sense of “happiness.” That brings it back to Earth. You can adjust your personality or recognize traits of your personality while your ever-ephemeral soul slips past. You can make your happiness about your next meal or making someone smile. You can tie your well-being to actions that keep you healthy.

I think people use the ambiguity of language and I don't think they admit to the amount of things they get away with in doing so.

Just today I read someone accuse someone else of “being outside of reality” while they were arguing politics. Truly, if you believed someone was outside of reality you wouldn't spend your time pretending they knew what you were talking about. What would words mean to them anyway? You might as well throw at them a bowl of alphabet soup. There's a shift away from “the topic.” Politics is certainly a broad structure from which to discuss something, but it doesn't include people speaking Martian languages.

The idea of caricaturing has been heavily on my mind. Many things come across as total jokes of themselves. Debates are screaming matches. Republicans become Nazi's. It's all about the he said she said as if these back and forths don't take place via text...which can be quoted...and immediately sourced. Maybe it's reality TV or your “nerdy” blog post, it all becomes this game of who can be more ironic or self-aware than the last guy. It's how you always know the book was better.

I think this shift is as much a habit of people as it is engineered. You don't volunteer information that would make you look weak. You buy into the beautiful scenery that accompanies an advertisement for shitting easier. You can feel when something gets too far from where it began. You just have to be paying attention to what you were after in opening the dialogue.

But there seems to be the problem. I don't think people know what they're trying to say. Years of therapy are sometimes reduced to “I am afraid of sex.” Why would it take someone years of their life to come to that conclusion? It was hidden in the wrong language. Often people are touted as stupid, evil, or in a severe state of denial. I think those often reduce to becoming conscious of the pitfalls in our language.

It certainly doesn't help when a compelling emotion provokes you into saying or doing things that take the point ever farther away. And how do you think we can hope to wrestle with or discuss those feelings when they suffer from the same problem? Are you sad, or depressed? Are you jealous or feeling a sense of loss? Are you angry, or perhaps terrified?

I think you can establish pivot points. You can create rules for how you're going to engage in certain conversations, with certain kinds of people, with specific people, or with yourself. I use writing as a way to ground potentially scattered and incomplete ideas somewhere so I can look back and remember why I stopped or started some behavior. If someone pokes me and wants to discuss politics or religion, I root myself in first defining terms and clarifying language and intent. 20 minutes spent explaining to me all the cool things that will happen to my soul when I die is dramatically wasted. So is trying to rationalize which President is most responsible for “how shitty things have gotten around here.”

Do you have a form and a habit? Are you comfortable just ignoring all the confrontation altogether? At the very least, because this can be done silently and secretly, can you recognize how quickly something goes from pivoting around a subject to traveling so far away you forgot why you're even playing? If you can, so many conversations get immediately boring. So many fights dissolve because you'll find no reason to care. Not because you don't care about the topic, but because you don't want to waste time pretending like you don't with such banal squabbling.

A calm disposition is often a learned one. It's a conscious decision not to hit people and yell. Extend that consciousness onto how and why you talk. Figure out why you're provoked to act one way over another. I think then you'll start to feel like you have a place in the discussion and aren't just walking headlong into the dizzying array of worthless opinions. My hope is that it would also give you the confidence to speak about what's on your mind as well. Playing it safe is not the same as playing it smart.