–no question mark
My last boss thought I interrupted him too much. I did. I broke the habit…around him. I cringed inside every time I heard myself do it. Our facial expressions would conform into the same shape simultaneously, as his frustration-fueled anger matched my internal disgust at not having nipped the terrible habit in the bud.
When I interrupt you I’m being anxious, I’m excited. Know when I interrupt, it’s because I know where you are and I feel like I can anticipate where you are going.
But it’s downright awful and rude, too; don’t get me wrong.
And speaking of, what’s really helped me break the habit of interrupting is seeing how my family speaks. These conversations are speaking AT, not with or for the communication. A lot of families speak at each other. Think, hormonal teens to their parents and vice versa. In my grandmother’s den, every story is overlapped by another’s intrusion. itssofuckingsannoying. I’ve been known to pause myself and say ‘stop interrupting me, let me finish!’ My irritation and observation forced my own change.
Of course we all have moments of excitable civility when we sit across from another with a coffee or tea or wine or cocktail and the entire meeting is anticipatory and anxious, so the dialogue performs like a circus: highs and lows, excitement and pensive calm, comfortable silences even…depending. This is all well and general and not specifically what i’m speaking of. We already come into these settings with the implication of rambling or catching up.
I feel certain our best conversations happen when we aren’t even looking at the other. When we are riding in the car staring out onto the road; when we are sitting on the porch staring out onto the landscaping or the street; when we are sitting at a bistro watching passersby; when we are lying on the couch or the bed staring into the nothingness of a ceiling or room space. I would suppose we’ve evolved to learn so well the minute facial expressions, actually speaking face to face diminishes our ability to listen well, because it does the same thing interrupting does: we are anticipating based on visual cues. It can be a distraction. To listen well is to not multi-task. I say this in no way to diminish the importance of involuntary reads and instinctual visual perceptions but to make further clear that real communication requires focus.
As blind people have learned to hear more than seeing people can, it is an acute sense worth practicing.
Consider when we are learning something new, how deliberate we are with focusing and listening. Out of habit and necessity to carry on, we casually brush this intention aside during most conversation.
I’ve gone on enough, you get the point 🙂
{Hear me now and Hear me out -could be a song lyric. My music writing brain reads and hears so much in a rhythm.}
Addendum: I have spent 80% of the day in utter silence, moving from task to task. Silence is the most relaxing thing to me, truth be told. And 100% the main reason why I don’t want to have children. Quiet.
