If you try to make and drink tea on a flat surface, you will have a fairly rough time. That’s why we have cups. However, if I give you a cup of tea, and you start eating the cup, you will miss the point of the cup entirely.

Words, as containers of meaning, serve as simplifications for what we wish to convey.

Likewise, meaning would be difficult to communicate without words or language. One operates as the container and the other as the content.

If we look too deeply into the meaning, we will miss what is actually being communicated, and if we get hung up onto the details of the words, we will miss the meaning that they hold.

To listen well, don’t eat the cup, use it — and drink the tea.

Unfortunately, we tend to eat cups and spill tea on a regular basis.

The nature of communication requires that we have simple heuristics to use as common shared understandings. The word ‘dog’ points to a four-legged creature as much as it describes a certain kind of tenacity; the word ‘grief’ describes as heavy of a response to loss as it does lightly a mild irritation or annoyance. Straightforward enough.

Yet, when it comes to truly understanding ourselves and other people — especially as it relates to their/our own experience — we rarely take the time to be clear about what words have certain significance to us or ask/listen to what they truly mean for others.

To quote my good friend and Ph.D Professor of All Things Communication, Dr. S. K. Webb,

“ Each individual word is important. Taking the time to understand how you define words like “love,” and then taking the time to explain your definition to others is a damn game changer. Each word we use has deeply ingrained interpersonal and cultural meanings. And everyone’s definitions vary…

… lots of people ask me how to communicate (better), and when I tell them things like, “define your terms,” they don’t do it. And then wonder why they are misunderstood.”

There’s a certain level of expectation that comes with language that we ought to just get it.

After all, it feels good when we don’t have to explain what we mean by our feelings of [insert emotion here] to a friend or someone who doesn’t require that explanation. There’s a lot of value in that (+ it saves time and effort).

Now, imagine taking the time to investigate and approach how and what we mean when we communicate — both verbally and non-verbally — with curiosity. How much more fulfilling could our social relations be?

In the network of social context, for better and for worse, we enter conversations with preconceived narratives of the person(s) or topic and prematurely judge before we ever actually begin to communicate. We listen through screens and speak through filters.

These filters come from all sorts of things, from who we’re interacting with, our emotional state, political affiliations, etc, and we impose these screens onto others instead of interacting with and understanding the individual or people as they are.

And just as we do unto others, others do unto us.

Therefore, what we really hear is our own noise — we hear our own sound, and not what is actually being said or communicated. We eat our own cup and spill the other’s tea.

It is extremely difficult to put aside those predispositions.

The strange, honest thing about this entire situation is that we are aware. To maintain your position in your network of social relations necessitates that you pass through the right agendas, screens, and filters with flying colors (and vice-versa. None of us would be able to operate in this social reality unless we had some acknowledgement and acceptance of it.

We have a human tendency not to test our assumptions; instead, we seek to prove them.

And you can be damn sure we’ll find the information that passes through our narrative checklist to make sure that we’re right (or at least, that we like what we hear). However, like an animal tethered to a pole, we can only go so far when the mind is static and fixated by such a certain pattern or condition.

At one part of the spectrum, when we learn to listen well, we intentionally seek to remove those barriers…and come closer to removing those screens that tether us to our own echo chamber of beliefs. We become better able to face the things that don’t quite make sense to us yet with curiosity instead of reinforcing the boundaries of our own little world with judgment.

Now, listening well and cultivating that understanding does not necessitate that we agree to or condone other people’s motives, behaviors, or actions. It hardly means that we need to accept other people’s terms as our own.

It simply means that we acknowledge that other versions of reality exist; understanding how they are defined and how we define our own deepens the connection between ourselves and others.

Whether friend, enemy, or stranger, that harmonious understanding is one where realities intersect and empathy begins.

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