Moving Forward

So many of us have so much in common. Whether it is in South Korea where I continue to live and work or in the United States where I will eventually return to retire to a life of family, friends, matinee movies, yard work, and and lots more reading, I am reminded of this truism every day. Small children, for instance, enjoy riding in shopping carts at the grocery store regardless of their home country. People, alas, liter more than they should. Teenagers focus on their iPhones with great intensity, and most everyone displays great tolerance and even patience when it comes to how imperfectly we all communicate from time to time.

Most every day I am on the receiving end of that tolerance in daily conversations with colleagues and friends. The "right" words do not always come out of mouth; or if they do, it is not as quickly as I would prefer. And, to be fair, it is the same when people speak to me. Despite that, we all continue to converse, collaborate and (knock on wood) enjoy each other's company. The meanings we try to impart to each other are, generally, understood. The result is we act accordingly, move forward, and remain close enough in-sync to maintain a reasonable degree of harmony. Overall, I would say that is not a bad way to progress.

Communication is considered a social science, in part, because there is a degree of fuzziness or imprecision to it that, say, mathematics does not have. In math, two plus two is four and that is all their is to it. But when it comes to communicating, people can use incorrect words or mispronounce things, yet still convey their intended meaning. We all want or even need to understand that which surrounds us, yet do so in ways that reflect our own uniqueness. We have our own biases, history, perspectives, etc. that reflect how we see or interpret things. Yet, generally, we connect with a high level of consistency. All this is to say, communication brings out both our acceptance of imprecision and intellectual flexibility to move forward just the same. Not bad.