Tag Archives: life

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A Nickel and Two Pennies for Your Thoughts

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Only 7% of what people glean when they listen to us is verbal. That’s staggering. It’s life-changing. It’s monumental. It means that someone who never talks could, hypothetically, be 93% as effective a communicator as someone who talks.

Albert Mehrabian, in the 1960s, ran a bunch of experiments and discovered that humans make emotional and value-laden judgments based almost solely on non-verbal cues. We don’t really care what a person is saying so long as they are saying it in a nice tone and confidently and while leaning in a bit and while making eye contact.

I suppose this is something rhetoricians, politicians, and pick-up artists have known for quite some time. But we don’t really like rhetoricians, politicians, and pick-up artists. We lump them in with used-car salesmen. They are slimy and tricky and deceitful. The devil probably is the  smoothest being in the world. I wrote a story once where the devil was a man in a white suit. He looked a little bit like James Stewart. He sounded like your father and patted you on the back like an old friend. That’s the only way I can understand the devil.

I think it’s easy to start thinking that people who are more concerned with the 93% non-verbal cues are just intrinsically crafty. But rhetoricians, politicians, pick-up artists, used-car salesmen, and the devil aren’t slimy and crafty because they care about that 93% but because they are using that 93% to sell lies.

What would it look like, I wonder, if we started to use that 93% to love and in truth. We tell people all the time that we love them. We tell our friends, our family, that guy who just gave up his seat in class so that you and I can sit next to each other. And most of the time people don’t believe us. And why should they? “I love you” only makes up 7% of what they are hearing. But what if, every time we told someone we loved them, we lowered our voice a little, looked them straight in the eye, leaned forward, and touched them on the shoulder? What if every confession of love was made to seem like a secret? What if every compliment, every favor, every piece of encouragement was delivered like the most private and personal and valuable of statements? It would be staggering. It would be life-changing. It would be monumental.

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Unconditional Friendship

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My parents always used to tell me that I had to be a friend to have friends. I always thought that advice was pretty lame. Popular kids had friends because people wanted to be their friends, not because they were friendly. No one wanted to be my friend, I argued. I was perfectly nice and polite and thoughtful but no one wanted to be my friend. But then I started befriending people who had a lot of friends, and I realized that they have a lot of friends precisely because they are great friends, themselves. Parents 1, Spencer 0.

Friendship is such a slippery thing. We’ve been reading this guy in my Medieval English class named Aelred of Rievaulx. The last thing Aelred ever wrote was this dialogue called Spiritual Friendship. I think that’s pretty cool because Aelred didn’t die suddenly. He kind of died of old age so he knew it was coming, and yet, he chose to compose his last piece of writing on friendship. Up to this point, ‘Red (yeah, me and ‘Red are on a nickname basis) had written histories or traditional spiritual treatises. So it was kind of a departure for him too. The really cool thing about ‘Red is that people really liked him. And who better to write a piece on friendship than someone who is well liked?

Does't 'Red look friendly?

In Book Three of Spiritual Friendship two of Father Aelred’s students are giving him a hard time about a friend who he has that does some questionable things. They ask ‘Red how it is that he continues to be his friend even though this friend has a temper every once in a while. Aelred just so lovingly says to them, “once I had received him as a friend, he could never lose my love.” I love that. I love it for two reasons. 1. It is so very contradictory to what I do and 2. It is what love is.

This is so not how I treat friendship. If someone is hard to get along with, if we fight every once in a while, if we have tough conversations, I just give up on the relationship. I find new people (or, more accurately, let new people find me), and I move on with my life. But the problem with that is that when I stop treating that person like a friend, I am assuming that I am a perfectly agreeable person to get along with. And that’s just not true. I’m a pain in the butt to get along with. I complain constantly; I behave selfishly; and about one day a week I skip showering. I am extremely difficult to get along with, but thankfully, there are some people who show me some grace. And they are all beautifully wonderful people. And so when I stop talking to a friend, I’m basically saying, “Hey, I know you showed me grace a ton in the past, but I’m not willing to do the same for you so don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” And that’s wonderfully horrible.

But grace is a really important component of what love really is. It’s a choice. It’s a verb. And people sometimes understand this with romantic relationships but almost no one ever thinks about it with friendship. We can choose to love our friends even when they are being difficult. I think that gets really hard because we don’t want to give something to someone that he or she isn’t going to return. (This is part of the reason why ‘Red thinks we should choose friends wisely.) We want to know that the time we put into a relationship is going to be returned. I don’t think we can do that though. I think we have to love first when it comes to friends.

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I Just Spent a Whole Hour Blogging… Ugh

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I think that about 99% of the words that come out of my mouth are complaints. I’m constantly complaining. I complain about the weather, about my apartment, about my friends, about people I love, about life, about the kid in class who talks a little loud when he answers questions, and even about God. If I start a conversation with you and my first line isn’t a question, chances are I’m about to complain. Even when I ask a question, I’m normally just setting myself up for a complaint. Like if I was talking to my friend in Arizona, I might ask “Hey how’s the weather in Arizona?” Because, invariably it’s going to be nicer than Ohio weather, and then I get to complain, and that’s nice.

I’m not all that sure why I complain so much. I think mostly I don’t know what else I would talk about. And the thing is I don’t really even have negative thoughts about that many things. Sometimes I just make up complaints so that I have something to talk about. I do this often with people I’m trying to impress, especially girls. “Oh yeah, I had to read (fill in with awesome old epic poem/philosopher/theology/narrative) over the weekend. Such a pain, right?” WRONG! I love reading. I love reading old stuff. I’m a freakin’ English major. The funny thing about this is that it almost always backfires, especially when I’m around people who are excited about life (the kind of people I like to associate with). They just skip over my complaint, perhaps even commenting on how much they like the item in question, and then I just feel stupid.

But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And I think I complain for two major reasons:

1. I fear being perceived as serious.
If I am constantly complaining, then no one will actually know what I’m passionate about. I can’t be called a failure because I don’t really care about anything I’m doing because if I cared, I wouldn’t complain. I would be excited. I would tell people how awesome it is that I get to read great literature as part of my studies. I would tell people how great it is that I got to spend two hours talking to the friend I hadn’t seen in a while, instead of the one hour we had planned on.  I would tell people that I loved the rain even when I don’t have an umbrella because it reminds me of that scene from V for Vendetta when “God is in the rain.”

2. I want affirmation.
I want people to tell me how great I am. When I say things like “Girls aren’t interested in me,” I’m looking for people to tell me all the reasons why girls should be interested in me. Bonus points if there are specific names involved. When I say I’m not good enough for a position, I’m looking for people to tell me that of course I am. And when I complain about something outside myself, like a political ideology or a specific person’s thoughts on a topic, I’m looking for whoever is listening to tell me that I am a better person than the person/thing I’m complaining about.

This is all really ugly and sad and makes me miserable. It’s hard walking around in a world all day that you have to pretend you don’t like. And the scary thing about complaining is if you don’t stop, eventually you will start to believe that the world is miserable.  I read so many blogs, meet so many people, see so many news programs that are obsessed with the negatives – with what’s wrong in the world. But there is so much good going on in the world. I believe people respond to positive reinforcement – that if we actually have a legitimate complaint against someone, the best way to go about fixing it is to compliment the person on the other things you like about him or her.