Communication

I sometimes wonder how the first humans communicated.

Not the easy things.

Food.

Fire.

Danger.

Pointing at a fruit and making a sound probably gets the message across eventually. So does running away from something while screaming. Some forms of communication, I imagine, needed very little explanation.

But how did we communicate something like time?

Time fascinates me because it is something all of us seem to understand, yet none of us can actually show it to another person.

You can show me a tree.

You can let me touch a stone.

I can smell smoke, taste salt, hear thunder and see the sun.

Our senses give us a reasonably convenient common language for the physical world.

But time?

You cannot put yesterday on a table and point at it.

You cannot hold tomorrow in your hand.

You cannot smell five minutes.

Although, depending on what is cooking in the kitchen, you may occasionally be able to smell that dinner is five minutes away.

Time is something we experience without ever directly sensing the thing itself.

And somehow, at some point, one human had to make another human understand it.

I find that fascinating.

Perhaps it began with observation.

The sun was there. Then it was there. Then darkness came.

The moon disappeared and returned.

Seasons changed.

Children grew.

People aged.

Fruit appeared on trees, disappeared, and appeared again.

Something was happening, even when nothing appeared to be moving.

Eventually we found ways to describe that happening.

Days. Months. Years.

Hours. Minutes. Seconds.

We took this invisible experience, divided it into neat little pieces, gave each one a name…

and then proceeded to spend the rest of human history complaining that we don’t have enough of them.

But whose time?

What makes time even more interesting to me is that its passage may mean very different things depending on the creature experiencing the world.

Consider a tree.

From our perspective, a tree barely does anything.

It just stands there.

Very poor productivity.

No calendar. No commute. No Monday morning meeting asking why the quarterly leaves are down.

Yet a tree is constantly living.

Growing.

Responding.

Changing.

Only at a pace that is difficult for us to notice.

If I try, just for a moment, to imagine the world through the life of a tree, perhaps a human day would feel like an hour. A month might pass like a day. A year might feel like a month.

Not literally, of course.

I have never interviewed a tree.

Getting one to answer questions has proven difficult so far.

But the thought itself interests me.

Because perhaps our experience of time is not only about clocks.

Perhaps it is also shaped by the kind of creature we are.

We move at a certain speed.

We live for a certain number of years.

Our hearts beat at a certain rhythm.

Our senses notice changes within certain ranges.

So naturally, we built our understanding of time around ourselves.

Which is something humans are rather good at doing.

We measure forests in timber.

Rivers in water.

Land in square feet.

And trees, often, in how useful they are to us.

We even talk about the life expectancy of a tree.

I find the choice of word amusing.

Expectancy.

According to whom?

Maybe the tree wasn’t expecting anything.

Maybe it was perfectly happy standing there until we arrived with a measuring tape and a chainsaw.

There is perhaps a larger thought hiding there about the way we understand the world only through our own experience of it.

But I will leave the trees alone for now.

They have already endured enough from us.

From sensing to imagining

It seems relatively easy to communicate something when both of us can experience it through our senses.

If I say something is hot, you can touch it.

If I say something smells terrible, you can smell it.

If I say there is a loud noise outside, you can hear it.

We have common reference points.

But communication becomes much more interesting when there is nothing to point at.

How do we explain yesterday?

Or hope?

Or fear?

Or justice?

Or love?

Or loneliness?

Or a memory?

At some point, human communication had to move beyond:

Look at that.

It had to become:

Imagine this.

And I think there is something extraordinary about that little leap.

Because once we can make another person imagine something that exists only inside our own mind, we are no longer limited to communicating what is physically in front of us.

I can tell you about something that happened when you weren’t there.

You can describe a place I have never seen.

We can warn each other about something that hasn’t happened yet.

We can talk about what frightens us even when there is nothing around us to be frightened of.

And perhaps most importantly, we can discuss things that do not exist at all.

Not yet, anyway.

Plans.

Possibilities.

Ideas.

Entire worlds.

All with sounds that come out of our mouths.

Or marks on a surface.

In fact, you are looking at tiny shapes on a screen right now and somehow constructing my thoughts inside your head.

When we stop and think about it, communication is quite ridiculous.

And somehow…

it works.

Mostly.

What actually reaches the other person?

We often speak about communication as though a thought moves neatly from one person’s head into another.

I have an idea.

I turn it into words.

You hear those words.

And now you have my idea.

But I don’t think that is quite what happens.

I have an idea.

I try to translate it into language.

You receive that language.

And then you rebuild the idea inside your own mind.

You rebuild it using your experiences.

Your memories.

Your understanding of those words.

The things you have seen.

The things that have happened to you.

Perhaps even the mood you happen to be in when you read them.

What arrives in your mind, then, can never be exactly what existed in mine.

Maybe close.

Sometimes very close.

But never quite identical.

And once I think about communication that way, misunderstandings become far less mysterious.

Two people can hear exactly the same sentence and understand two completely different things.

Sometimes we spend ten minutes explaining an idea and the other person understands immediately.

Sometimes we spend ten minutes explaining ourselves and somehow leave the conversation further apart than when we started.

“No, that’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“That’s what I’m trying to explain.”

We have probably all been there.

And maybe that is also why one of the nicest things another person can say is:

“I know what you mean.”

Especially when you realise they actually do.

Because something that existed only inside you has, however imperfectly, made its way into another person’s world.

Maybe that is what communication really is

Perhaps communication is not simply about exchanging words.

Perhaps it is an attempt to cross the distance between two experiences of being alive.

I cannot experience the world exactly as you do.

You cannot experience it exactly as I do.

Even something as seemingly universal as time may feel different between us.

Five minutes waiting for someone you love can feel long.

Five minutes with someone you love can disappear.

The clock insists both were exactly three hundred seconds.

We may strongly disagree.

And yet, somehow, we keep trying to explain ourselves to one another.

We invented gestures.

Sounds.

Languages.

Writing.

Pictures.

Music.

Stories.

And eventually emojis, because apparently several thousand years of linguistic development still could not adequately communicate:

🙃

Perhaps early humans struggled to explain time.

Thousands of years later, we are still struggling to explain what we mean.

Maybe that is not a weakness in communication.

Maybe that struggle is communication.

One human being trying to make something inside their world visible inside the world of another.