One thing in life I really tend to dislike is having people leave multiple messages on my phone. As someone who works a lot (perhaps too much), and does not conduct personal business during work hours, I tend to find that my personal business gets rather crowded after work, unless I have a morning where sleep has fled from my eyes that allows me to conduct some in early morning, as happened today with the last part of the schedule I was working on last night [1]. So, because I made the foolish mistake of drinking too much iced tea too late in the evening, so that even without a troubled sleep my heart was racing too much to stay asleep. So, needless to say, I was extremely tired today because my sleep was so poor, and that meant that I wasn’t as eager to multi-task as I might otherwise have been.

Still, I must admit that I am in general not someone who really likes to talk on the phone. It can be useful at times, but I find that the tone of voice in the absence of visual cues does not help so much, and I tend to find that talking on the phone for a long while tends to hurt my ears. That said, it is certainly a very useful thing to be able to call someone so long as you do so with respect for where other people are coming from and also seek to make the conversation worthwhile. It does not serve anyone’s purposes to hurry for a phone conversation if no one can do anything about it. That happens more often than I would care to admit. For whatever reason, talking on the phone is something I have put up with, because it was the best option available, but not something I have often really enjoyed.

How does one make communication a pleasure? It is a task that is necessary in our lives, one that we all have a tendency from time to time to muddle through or not do very well, but how do we make it enjoyable. Good communication, after all, should bring benefit to both speaker and listener. We should be able to reflect and refine our thinking and our feeling in the process of forming our thoughts. Likewise, the presence of an attentive audience, to whose concerns we are also attentive, helps us and encourages us in our own communications, either with each other or third parties. To expect perfection is unreasonable, to expect instantaneous understanding is unprofitable, but to expect that we can take the time to practice our communication and improve it is itself not unreasonable at all. Much of communication comes with making ourselves clear enough that others know where we are coming from and what we are looking for so that we can act accordingly. Additionally, we have to be attentive enough to others so that they can make themselves understood as well. It is a wonder, given the constraints that we work under and the self-centeredness that comes naturally, that we can communicate well at all, and enjoy it as much as we do. Perhaps our longings make us appreciate good communication more, even if it is an immense challenge for us.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/the-scheduler/