WHAT WILL YOU DO WHEN IT’S GONE?

“Talking it Over” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland Rasmussen

Short term memory is the bunk. People stop in the middle of a sentence with a bewildered look on their face while they mumble something which fades away into the ether. What happened to conversation. No one thinks they are as good as they used to be, and their memory extends only as far as the next sentence. It’s a vicious circle, involving the loss of eyeglasses, car keys and whatever else they last had their hands on.

Of course I am discussing everyone else but me. I always know precisely why I went into the bathroom to find the strawberry jam.

ARE YOU LISTENING?

It’s fairly easy to tell when someone is actually listening to you. Body language is usually a dead give-away. For instance, I can always tell when Dr. Advice is not listening to me because he has a glazed look on his face, and his body language and spoken words don’t agree. My habit on those times is to simply say in a continuing conversational manner “I need to go wash the cat!”. It usually snaps him to attention. Besides we haven’t owned a cat for nearly 40 years.

When speaking to a group of children or simply the one child who needs to clean his/her room, a barely inaudible grunt while he/she is absorbed in a TV program or video game, is a sure sign that your message did not get through. It is my understanding that Bill Gates as a child answered his mother’s call to dinner from his downstairs room by saying “I’m busy”. But then, chances are, you did not give birth to another computer genius, and as it turned out, he really was busy.

Speakers are aware of body language, referred to as “audience awareness”, or relating to a group. As you prattle on about your favorite subject, and see that the audience is sitting back in their seats with their chins down and arms crossed on their chest, you might get a hunch that your delivery is not going well, or that half the audience is asleep. If what you are speaking about is contained in a slide show of “What I Did On My Summer Vacation”, and you hear snores rumbling through the darkened room, you blew it.

Women are far more perceptive than men, which means being able to spot the contradictions between someone’s words and their body language. Female intuition is evident in women who have raised children. For instance, I long ago convinced my children and grandchildren that mothers really did have “eyes in the back of their heads”. How else to explain the sudden change of plans which accurately foiled any after-school activity they may have planned? It is a parental challenge at which mothers somehow can do intuitively.

It is a proven fact that women have far greater capacity for communicating and evaluating people than men do. Women have between fourteen and sixteen areas of the brain to evaluate others’ behavior versus a man’s four to six areas. This may explain how a woman can attend a dinner party and rapidly work out the state of relationships of other couples at the party—who’s had an argument, who likes who, and so on.

The female brain is organized for multitracking—the average woman can juggle between two and four unrelated topics at the same time. She can watch a TV program while talking on the telephone plus listen to a second conversation behind her, while drinking a cup of coffee. She can talk about several unrelated topics in the one conversation and use five vocal tones to change the subject or emphasize points. Unfortunately most men can only identify three. As a result, men often lose the plot when women are trying to communicate with them.

Then there is the “Fast Talker”, frequently a man, who has so much to say in a short time, and covers so many divergent subjects, that his spoken words pour out and flow like a spring thaw. These men are frequently lawyers or politicians. Are you listening Dr. Advice?

CONVERSATIONAL PING PONG

“Talkin’ It Over” watercolor by kayti sweetland rasmussen

Good conversation has a beginning and an end. I regret to say that some people don’t know how to end one. Let me explain: first, check out their body language. No, that doesn’t mean to give unnecessary attention to certain parts of their body. If they begin fidgeting or their eyes glaze over, or they begin looking for a fast way out, you know that the conversation is over. It absolutely does NO good to pop in another subject. They really need to get away. And don’t take offense. They probably like you all right, and they’ll be OK with it another day. But for now, gracefully drift away.

I watched a wonderful example of good conversation on TV the other day. Six elderly Chinese women in their 90’s were asked the question “what do you talk about together?” It turns out they talk about everything women everywhere talk about, which is everything! Children, family, health matters, politics etc. took precedence in those women’s conversation. And if they still had husbands, they probably used them as an inexhaustible subject! The important thing was the way they conducted their conversation, by taking turns, no one interrupting the other, but with expectant faces waiting to jump in when the time was right. Conversational ping pong!

General rules for good conversation go like this:

1. Eliminate the overuse of the word “I”.

2. No name-dropping.

3. No unsolicited advice.

4. No deliberate digs at their politics or religion, although those subjets are no longer taboo. In fact, they have always been the most interesting of subjects if you can keep others from clubbing you to death.

5. When in a group of people and you are not the speaker, try not to doze. It may be imnpossible in some cases, but do try to drink another cup of coffee or something to keep you awake until you can take your leave.

6. No monologues!! This is a huge rule. Try not to forget this one.

7. Sports is always a great opener. Just try not to bad mouth the other person’s favorite team or Alma Mater.

8. It’s perfectly all right to discuss sex, as long as it’s discreet and not about your next door neighbor.

A good conversation is energizing, and should give you material for your next conversational ping pong game. Just go for it!

NOTABLE & QUOTABLE

“I have never been in a discussion where people said ‘I only wish we had nore time to talk about the weather/sports/gossip’ But, given the need to find common topics for discussion, these are some of the easiest common denominators to find.”

Quote by Dan Ariely, Wall Street Journal

TOTAL NOISE CULTURE

There are people to whom silence is odious. The radio and/or TV must be on or they become uncomfortable. The art of conversation is not lost on them; for to them silence is not golden. If TV should fail them, they talk.

A man friend of ours is devoted to classic jazz, which he cranks up to the decibal of a B-17 bomber. He is also an antique clock collector, and each of his many beautiful clocks chimes the hour, the half-hour, and some even announce the quarter hour.

But we are so overburdened with data, rhetoric and spin that it is difficult to absorb, much less try to make sense of. We are entertaining ourselves to death.

A friend living alone and with a slight hearing loss, was fitted for a hearing aid, thinking it would give her twenty-five year old hearing once more. Not so. She thought it would be a little “pre-old-age” touch to prepare for for the inevitable. Now she is aware of the slightest creaking of her house in the dark of midnight, the rhythmic pulse of the refrigerator, with it’s periodic glassy crash of the ice-maker disturbs her sleep. The rustle of the leaves in her garden sound like a freight train rumbling through the yard. You begin to hear sounds you heard before but weren’t aware you were hearing, and they aren’t always pleasant.

We are failing in our efforts to pin down this increasingly incomprehensible reality. The ubiquitous cell phone ring tones, the lyrics to contemporary pop music, the sounds of today’s everyday life of course skipped our ancestors, and have left us envious of the “quiet life” people speak of.

We can recapture that delicious “aloneness” when hiking in the wilderness, running a well-known trail, or fishing a solitary stream, or walking beside a quiet sea at sunset. During the War, to get a little peace and get away from the pounding of the engines, my husband used to sit at the fantail of his ship and listen to the sound of the screw while watching the phosphorescent wake pealing out behind.

Peace and tranquility are what we sometimes need for our own well-being.