Making Sense

I was just driving, distracted, having a little stream-of-consciousness chat with myself and I started to wonder if any other person on earth could follow the conversation.

Has this idea ever occurred to you, too?

...That perhaps you are your own best listener, because maybe, just maybe, you don't make much sense outside your own head?! :)

Seriously, there's something to the idea that each human being is his or her own best processor of thought. Often, we can move fastest when we think alone. I've witnessed some pretty fast zigs and zags of the mind when I'm not (or another person isn't) trying to fit into the confines of inter-personal communication -- when one is not consciously trying to "make sense."

Sure, we can sound like crazy people when stuck in our own heads, but we often know exactly what *we're* talking about. The trouble comes when we have to talk to another person.

Sometimes people can't move forward, together, at all -- because we can't shape our thoughts into a format that can be processed by anyone else.

And yet... and yet! Though it slows us down and makes us work harder, we are also built to desire a connection to another consciousness -- some "meeting of the minds" -- so very much that we're willing to edit ourselves all the time to achieve it.

Take the stream-of-consciousness thing happening in my car. No one could really follow that, but no one needed to. No one else was there. Had I been carrying a passenger, I would have automatically flipped on some internal regulator and started reformatting what was going on in my head -- or at least how it came out. I would probably not have said aloud (as I actually did in my car) "Oh, crap! Those things! I gotta do the ... eh... myeah... TODA-- do we need flu shots?!" Instead, I would assess and redact and repackage ideas into more tidy points before they slipped out.

(Well, mostly. I find the closer the company one is keeping, the greater the portion of the "internal monologue" that tends to slip out. My poor Jeremy gets no segues out of me.)

...But isn't it fascinating how every human society rears its own to make verbal adjustments like that?

And when members of a society make little or no distinction between their "interior" and "out loud" voices, they often aren't part of a very big society -- because most other people avoid their company.

It's like we've all been trained to be a little less us so we can engage more of them.

Have you ever thought how much easier it'd be to communicate if we could just merge heads and cut out the No Man's Land in-between? Like the Vulcan mind meld, without the near-insanity.

Have you ever dwelled on the idea that it's actually kind-of hard work to make sense to another person -- ANY other person?

It's not like talking to oneself.

Not to promote that I have a split personality (uhn -- pretty sure I don't...), but I've noticed I tend to separate into 2 roles when I talk to myself. Part of me generates the list of things that are important, and another part of me files those things away. The generator part of me is pretty scattered, I'll say -- her more orderly thoughts are interrupted and interspersed and overlaid with things that pop like corn up there. The other me holds a clipboard and rolls her eyes a lot. She's always sorting the kernels into action items.

If I'm gonna marshal my forces and speak out loud, I need both parts of me to work together, so Popcorn Brain doesn't take over, but so Quality Control has something to say. This is work!

And yet, happily I do it. Because I want so desperately to get OUT of my own head sometimes! The society of oneself can be great comfort, yes. Everyone needs to cultivate it. But along with that, everyone needs to seek the society of others. And until Star Trek: a.) perfects that mind meld thing, and b.) um, becomes reality, I guess we'll just have to do the work to get there.

And that's OK. It's nice work if you can get it. And you can get it, if you try...