Anyway, what normally would have been a brief exchange of “friendly” insults somehow turned out to be a normal, amiable conversation. With short questions such as “How are you doing,” “Are auditions going well” and “What did the doctor say about your broken pinky,” I was able to steer away from less fascinating topics — what went on in the basement of Terrace, who happened to look sluttiest this weekend — and move toward subjects we both found interesting.
I felt invigorated. By arguing less and listening more, I had completely changed my daily routine with my friend and had modified my perception of him. It was then that I realized what I should have learned freshman year, or probably even at the age of 3: I can blow as much hot air as I want, but it’s not going to get me where I want to be in a social setting.
Whether at this university or during our lives prior to it, those of us attending Princeton have at some point acquired the miraculous ability to create something out of seemingly nothing. Much like Rumpelstiltskin can weave gold from straw, we can make a 12-page paper out of the topic of sarcophagi as agents of sexual equality (done that); we can write a 30-page junior paper on the flashy dance scenes in South Asian cinema (working on it); and we can somehow wring a thesis out of Bollywood ideology in Mumbai (anthropology department, please give me the money).
These skills help us survive academically, but they tend to make us sink in social situations. There is nothing attractive about being talked at rather than talked to. I, myself, am occasionally guilty of talking on and on about my life without soliciting any input from the person I am talking to. When subjected to the same torture, I cringe at the thought of having inflicted such horrors on someone else. In these cases, one person does all the blabbing, with no feedback, and the other performs all the (feigned) attentiveness, with no personal investment.
It is through our conversations with one another that we begin to feel either truly respected or completely looked down on. If someone doesn’t appreciate what I have to say, how do I know they appreciate me at all? The words we trade, the thoughts we discuss and the speeches we occasionally give are a symbolic way of giving part of ourselves. For this act to be swept under a rug to make way for the unstoppable force of a self-involved person is the ultimate insult. Along with the motivation to obey an unspoken etiquette, it is wise for us to remember the effect we are having on the person we may be bulldozing with our unceasing avalanche of sentences regarding how stressed we are or how few hours of sleep we got last night.
So while I admit to being a novice in the fine art of genuine dialogue, let me divulge the small bit of knowledge I have gained: Sometimes, the best words spoken are few. And sometimes, they come only after patiently waiting to collect the full story from the other side. For those, like me, with the tendency to be a bit mouthy, it’s amazing how a good mental filter improves the quality of our advice, conversation and humor. It allows us to dispose of all the extra mind-numbing words that spring up like weeds when we speak too much.
Academic habits notwithstanding, our malaise of the mouth is best cured when focusing on the back-and-forth, not just the forth. To best engage, we have to be as attentive to the other side as to our own thought processes. Only when we learn to communicate better by speaking less are we truly able to convey the value we place in our interlocutors and the respect we have for their thoughts, beliefs and input.
Joey Barnett is an anthropology major from Tulare, Calif. He can be reached at jbarnett@princeton.edu.
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