I have been working as a communication trainer for 20 year, yet I still find communication as damn difficult. When things get down to the personal issues, intimate relationships and emotional realms, it seems to be so difficult to communicate, to truly reach an understanding, to get my messages across and to in fact get what other people are trying to communicate to me. Even if everybody involved is really trying very hard.
And I have been practising, wholeheartedly, the nonviolent communication which seems to me as the ultimate way to communicate and a clear bridge that leads from one shore to another. Yet, often, much too often, I feel completely hopeless, not having any ideas what to do, how to bridge the gap, how to communicate, how to reach the other person (or let the other person reach me). No bridges anywhere, just gaps and canyons. No answers, only piles of questions. An ultimate insurmountable mountain.
Gets me thinking about our human individual existential isolation. As Yalom puts it, existential isolation refers to an unbridgeable gulf between ourselves and any other being, or even a fundamental separation between ourselves and the world. We like to think we are cross-connected and not really alone, however sooner or later we will need to enter that last tunnel and experience, as Yalom beautifully puts it, the most lonely human experience – death. And face our isolation, I guess.
I know we do not like this idea of isolation and tend to seek shelter under concepts of universal connectedness, divine love, everything being one, and so forth. However, on the very experiential level here and now, aren’t we ultimately captured inside our own limited and isolated little individual beingness?
I guess no communication and no relationship can ever eliminate this fundamental isolation. Yet, it seems to me we are trying exactly this. To somehow cure our pain – or at least the heaviness of realisation – of being isolated, to run away from it, to make it disappear, to pretend it is not here. For as long as we can. Find our soul mates, deeeeeeep relationships, spiritual family… Isn’t it simply out of not being able to bear with the isolation?
At least this is what I can observe within myself. Putting so much effort in trying to be completely, properly, ultimately understood. Because I will than feel connected and not that isolated. Just how neurotic is that? I must be driving people mad by trying to accomplish perfect communication with them.
I guess this blog is one aspect of this neuroticism as well.
