Good Communication Requirements

Our lives develop based mostly on decisions and interactions with others, and we want all of them to be wise. But, sometimes, decisions and relationships are overly complicated.

When I had my third, but not last, back surgery, I was in great pain and could not walk. My doctor decided from testing that my second back surgery had resulted in an infection in my spine. The decision before me was simple, do the surgery, stop the infection, and stop the pain! Communicating the problem and the optional solutions was clear. A decision on a fourth surgery was more complicated. It would be my third back surgery in less than a year. The infection had weakened a vertebra and my doctor later found it was cracked. There was still pain but not as severe. I had a new choice to make; live with the cracked vertebra and some pain or have the surgery to fuse that vertebra with other fused vertebra and possibly be relieved of all pain. I chose surgery because I wanted to be rid of the pain. Unfortunately, I still live with pain every day. We make the best decisions we can with the information we have and must live with the consequences. I had to ask questions and work at learning to understand the language of a back surgeon so that my decisions were well informed.

To make wise decisions, and communicate our understanding of any topic, we need to be well informed and as sure as possible of the terminologies we use and encounter.

Our preparation for our understanding life and other people begins in childhood. It comes from within the family of origin: What do mom, dad, older siblings, aunty, uncle, nana, and opa talk about that might seep into our blank little brains? Who do they expose us to where we hear more new, conflicting ideas? What do they read to us? How do they explain the stories they tell us? What do they let us hear on the radio/tv?

We may be taken to church at an early age. We get up early (for a weekend), we dress in our best Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and our world expands into religious ideas, bible stories, morality plays, boring sermons – more stuff to correlate with what we might already know. We are then exposed to twelve, or more if kindergarten is included, years of public school, depending on where you live in this big world. There we find an overabundance of innovative ideas that are purposely intended to give us more information to collect and manage. Teachers and parents expect us to put the pieces of the puzzle together cohesively as we age, year after year, into opinions of what is fact and fiction. They may, perhaps, hone our truths if we choose to confide in them. By the end of schooling, we have more knowledge pieces for placing in our puzzle but no real clarity on the manner in which the puzzle can be solved. How do we ever manage to survive all of that with any decent concept of truth is yet another puzzle? Seventeen or eighteen years old and, we are expected to have enough wisdom to go into an even larger learning environment – LIFE or COLLEGE.

If we spend time in college, we gather more pieces, but the puzzle remains incomplete because our life experiences have been funneled by education (yet we knew it all beginning at 15, right?). What courses we choose are informed by wobbly decisions about how we want to spend our adult life. (How many don’t have a clue? I did not, but I chose engineering because that was my dad’s dream for me.) Liberal Arts Colleges/Universities try to help by using most of the freshman year in providing a wide panoply of subjects chosen to provide us with career path guidance. I changed in my third year from a Chemistry Major to a Psychology Major. Neither of which was a direct path to Computer analysis/programming or ministry (two of my careers). I was as confused after I got my BA as I was when I started. Graduate School may allow us time to remain in the educational funnel but, sooner or later . . .

BANG! LIFE begins. What happens then to everything we believe to be truth?

New friends arrive from differing backgrounds having realities that may clash with our own, causing doubts about what we think we know. We take on jobs, our network of acquaintances grows even larger, and they bring new knowledge as do the jobs themselves. Our communication puzzles are still incomplete, yet they are being upended and reshaped at every turn. How can we ever know anything with great confidence? Still, we are SUPPOSED TO KNOW and MAKE GOOD DECISIONS.

As people with choices to make, ultimately we look for growing our knowledge to the knowledge of others, what they say and do. We seek better informed help in discerning what “truth” might be. We form our beliefs, opinions, and means of communicating by looking beyond the self as well as internally. For this we use personal, not fully formed, standards with which to raise others to a level of trust as unofficial mentors. We might choose family because we know them better. We might choose neighbors and/or friends because we have known them for a significant period. Or we might choose people who have risen to a level of prominence and thus have our respect: a renowned world figure, a President, a Senator, a Representative, a judge, a doctor, a lawyer (no joke intended), a rabbi, a priest, a pastor, a teacher, a scientist, etc. We look to the political parties of our parents, our friends, our coworkers, or our college classmates to determine our political stand. We seek confirmation that we have been on the right path, that the opinion we have right now is legitimate and true. And if the guidance we receive doesn’t fit with our beliefs as formed up until now, we must make a choice: modify our understanding or reject the guidance as not relevant. We might paraphrase Isaiah and say, “We don’t want YOUR truth. We prefer our own.” (Isaiah 30:10). Or we might take this added information (more puzzle pieces) and further hone and polish our beliefs and communication skills. We choose. All of our experiences and gathering of relevant information begins to create our persona, our truth, our definitions for communicating well, and our decision making for many years to come.

External pressures challenge what we believe ad infinitum – personal or family tragedy, elemental catastrophe, personal and intrapersonal experiences of hunger, poverty, wages, crime, territorial conflicts, the economy, taxes, health issues, etc. Sometimes we tire of trying to make things fit with our truth puzzle and we shut down new avenues of learning. We become dogmatic and resistant to changing our truth. We become uncivil with those who think differently than we do because we do not really want to have to look at our truth puzzles anymore. We isolate ourselves and then become obstacles to truth ourselves.

What I have written above is a description of some of the factors of learning to communicate as experienced by a Caucasian kid born in 1943 and raised by two parents of modest means with an older sister and a younger sister in the United States of America. I cannot begin to imagine the vast number of learning sources involved when ethnicity, country of origin, culture, economic standing, size of family, mental health, physical disabilities, and other factors are added.

There are so many factors that contribute to our beliefs and our understanding of life that it is no surprise that we can not hold a civil conversation, even in our own head. We need to accept and operate with the knowledge that each of us carry around different understandings that have been molded by lives that have been down extraordinarily different paths to the here and now.

Peace through grace, Bro. Ken