Talk

I've been thinking lately about the wonder of communication. Little crystals of interiority, each of us exists in a world of one. Everyone else we can only know from without. Ourselves we can only know from within. Even what others reflect back to us about ourselves, we can only receive and process from inside. And yet we ceaselessly impinge on one another in this crystal human web, our attention pulled in every direction by the quiver of relational strings.

There is a porousness to interiority. We forge and are forged within this mesh of relations — like prisms continually refracting our internalised perceptions of the world back to each other, growing as self and other in the process. In this continual exchange, intention and empathy make all the difference.

There are essentially two modes of interaction between human beings, as Sam Harris has pointed out: communication or violence. The impossibility of knowing another's inner world from within means we can either talk and listen until we reach a genuine sense of them, or fill that unknowable space with our own fears, suspicions, and projections. Violence, in one form or another, tends to follow the latter path. And yet, as Marshall Rosenberg observed, even communication frequently degenerates into its own kind of hostility when it becomes a contest of positions rather than an encounter between people. Every path can fork astray.

You don't need to delve into Saussure's semiotics or Wittgenstein's language games to appreciate what a miracle communication is in the first place. For words to mean something similar to two people, the bridge isn't found in the words themselves — which are, after all, just sounds — but in a shared ground of being. A common world in which we are less like independent points of agency firing signals at each other, and more like interconnected forces within a single field.

This assumption of common ground, I'd argue, is the critical foundation of meaningful talk. However unfamiliar or opposed your interlocutor may seem, assuming shared ground and actively seeking it is a prerequisite for genuine exchange. Only from a common foundation can two people attempt to see eye to eye. And that requires something specific: relating in good faith, with empathy and real curiosity about the other person's world.

Which is where listening comes in — and I mean real listening, not the performative kind. Listening is a state of receptivity. It is the act of creating space for another person to actually occupy. It isn't patience or tolerance, because patience and tolerance are often just impatience and intolerance held politely in check. Real listening is an attentive reception of another's world, with a genuine willingness to be changed by what you find there.

Before we speak, we need to make sure we've actually heard. A simple practice: reflect back what you understood and invite the other person to confirm or correct it. Without that step, conversations drift — each exchange carrying us a little further from what was actually meant, like the broken telephone game we played as children.

The purpose of talk is not to convince but to relate. Not to build a border but a bridge. Not to defend our inner space but to expand it — to let in novelty, difference, and the particular reality of another human being.

Here is a question worth sitting with: what if we approached every conversation with more willingness to be influenced than to influence — and more desire to grow than to convince?