All communication is storytelling. I recently had this revelation that all acts of communication whether they be profound or mundane are all forms of storytelling. The goal of communication is to impart information to someone else. Most communication strives to correlate itself with reality. Let me tell you what happened today. Let me tell you how to work this program. But all language can ever hope to do is point towards the truth of reality; it can never be reality itself, it can never be truth in and of itself. It is the most powerful guide to the truth that we as a species have, but all communication is ultimately a story told by one person to another.
For all the knowledge a mind can acquire, it has difficulty explaining that which is beyond words. The perception of any experience is made up of sights, smells, sounds, emotions, thoughts and memory. As time passes between the mind’s attention to an experience and the actual experience itself, the mind creates more and more thoughts, commentary and judgements on the original experience. When this person then relates this experience to someone else, the explanation is wrapped in that person’s own critique of the event. Therefore, one is never given the truth of an event but rather an impression of it based on a person’s reinterpretation of that original moment. One can only hope the story is accurately portraying the event.
Some people are excellent storytellers. Each anecdote passed along is pleasurable for the way it was told as much as for the actual knowledge shared. Many people have difficulty expressing themselves and their lack of communication skills can often hide the truth they so desperately want to share. The limitations of communication creates the boundary between two people truly understanding each other. In rare occassions, we are fortunate enough to meet someone with a similar outlook and mental framework as ourselves, and these relationships provide us with small amounts of the understanding we, as social creatures, crave. But for the most part, communication is diluted by the limits of language and context on the speaker’s side and the ability to truly listen without prejudice on the listener’s side.
The art of communication is the ability to open one’s self to the listener, to understand where he or she is at, and then to carefully use words or pictures or art to reach out and connect to him or her. The burden of communication is on the person speaking, even though the listener stands an impenetrable wall of preconceived thoughts and beliefs. Many people are unable to listen, they can only hear what is comfortable to them, what is palatable, the rest is blocked out as if it had never been spoken. In these cases, it is important to understand that communication is just storytelling: telling a story that strives to create a bridge of understanding between two people.
