A few years ago, a small child labeled as the talking man. I found this to be mildly amusing, because while it is true that I do talk a lot, I am hardly unusual in so doing. It puzzled me why I would be “the” talking man, instead of only “a” talking man, and I chalked it up to my fondness for talking after services while visiting the brethren of that congregation, as opposed to the more usual talking that many people did at church. There are certainly other people who talk a lot, but many people tend to talk only for their own benefit, because they feel it necessary to communicate something to others, and surprisingly few people enjoy the give and take of reciprocal conversation that is required in talking with someone else. Even when people want others to communicate with them, it is not always easy to find people willing (or able) to reciprocate. If communication to the degree and of the pervasive kind that we engage in is something unique, it is telling that this skill appears to be diminishing at present, because while people are no less able than before to feel the need to send signals out into the great unknown to try to communicate with others, the meeting of hearts and minds that appears to have happened in the past is not so easy at present.

Earlier today, while watching a video, I was listening to someone comment about a lengthy discourse he had given while his microphone was on mute on the subject of telling stories and its importance to humanity. And while I found it humorous that his original story was muted by some difficulties he had with his microphone–something that irritates me sometimes as well–the point is a solid one. Stories are what motivates people. Our best comics, our best writers and singers, the people we enjoy spending time with, all of them are generally good at telling stories. Even matters of contention when it comes to political disagreements tend to revolve around what sort of stories that we hear and believe about ourselves and others, about the abuses of power and those who seek after it, and so on. In the absence of metaphysical certainty about the world around us, which remains somewhat opaque to us despite our best intentions and efforts, a lot about the way we think and believe boils down to trust, and trust is a matter of the stories that are in our head, whether they are true or not.

People often have a higher degree of commitment to and believe in the stories they have in their heads about others than is warranted by the facts. One of the most alarming things to have seen is the sort of stories that people have written in their lives about me. These stories have often had so slender a connection to the truth that it was scarcely possible that they could in fact be thinking about me. While it is not a bad thing for others to find you a mystery and a riddle and wish to know you deeper but to be unable to do so, it is a bad thing when they will up what is mysterious with what is not true, and put thoughts and motives into your head that are not properly there but rather inside their own heads. When people trust in their own skills of observation and judgment, especially when those skills are deeply flawed and limited, there is often the tendency for people to believe what are in fact mere fabrications of their own mind or what they have heard from others. How we respond to the gulf that exists between how we think someone is thinking and feeling and the reality of it is often immense, and none of us is immune to making huge errors in supposing what is going on inside of others because we lack the insight to properly understand them.

It has often amused me that people consider communication to be a great solver of problems, while being simultaneously unaware that communication is often a great causer of problems. There are, it is true, often cases of misunderstanding where if we properly understood where someone was coming from then our difficulties with them would be removed. In such cases communication is to be recommended because it will clear up a genuine misconception between the parties and allow them to be at peace rather than estranged from each other. There are other times, though, where communication would only reveal the gulf that exists between people when their positions and thoughts are properly understood. In such cases, peace is to be preserved by polite silence that does not draw attention to the differences and that might even allow others to think that we are more closely aligned with them and more closely in agreement with them than is the case. This is especially true when we mostly agree with someone but are dealing with someone of such limited emotional maturity that they can only handle those who are in total agreement with them. In such cases we ought to bite our tongue and avoid creating unnecessary conflict for ourselves by alienating someone with whom we agree most of the time. We might consider conversation to be driving on an ice road, and in our efforts to connect people together we should be aware that sometimes the ice is covering solid ground upon which a genuine connection can be made, and sometimes that ice is covering crevices and large bodies of water, and so the sense of connectedness that truly exists between us and them is more temporary or fragile in nature. Surely we as talking people figured this out from the beginning, and early on found out that the words we could say, or later write, did not only bind people together but also tore them apart.