“Melissa, someone could become enlightened watching a piece of trash roll past them.” These were the provocative words of the guiding teacher at the meditation center where I practice. At the time, his words felt a bit irreverent, but they lingered with me.
My fourth-grade teacher was the first to say, “Melissa, you have a real gift for writing.” She was also the person who spun around one day, pointed her finger in my face and said, “And you, you little snip, I’ve had quite enough of you today.”
I was seven when a particularly mean-spirited girl taunted me at the bus stop saying, “You better be nice, Melissa, or your mom will give you away like she did your brother.” Later that day, I learned I did, in fact, have a brother who had been removed from our home. My world was turned upside down and with it, my sense of safety was incontrovertibly altered.
Our life is chock full of sound bites that stay lodged in our psyche. We attach to the ones that made us feel horrible or fabulous. And with painstaking diligence our brains compose a mosaic of messages that both define and limit us.
Have you ever considered what you want your conversational legacy to be?
One of the most consistent responses I have had to YOU.logy is that people do not think they could do it, nor understand why they should. If I am being honest, I am not always sure where the resistance comes from. But because I believe in the benefits of this approach to communication, it feels equally important to understand how others are hearing it and meeting it.
If I had to distill the comments into one flummoxing point of reference, people are struggling to shift their conversational interest from self to other. And as I grapple with the feedback, I often find myself attempting to articulate the concept from two perspectives. One that presents the original idea. And one that is attempting to address this consistent self-seeking inquiry, of what’s in it for me?
For several months now I have been trying to untangle this position of betwixt and between. Is YOU.logy something we do for others or for ourselves? While on an unusual walk in the rain, the much sought after clarity presented itself. YOU.logy is not an EITHER/OR choice. It is an act of kindness that happens when we no longer insist on seeing separation between ourselves and others.
The moment of clarity arrived in such a mysterious way it is worth sharing.
My work schedule recently presented me with a consecutive block of days off and I was looking forward to a good stretch of uninterrupted writing time. I started my day with a meditation and as the ideas were flooding in, I felt excited to get to my computer. When rain started drumming alternating patterns on the roof, and the house shimmied with claps of thunder, I felt the universe had brilliantly conspired to support my time in the office.
But as I have advanced in years, I have also developed migraines. They don’t arrive often, but when they do, I know my functioning will be diminished to a surrendered malaise. So, when the blackened edges started to encroach on my peripheral vision, I knew my writing ambition would be thwarted.
Unable to relax the vice grip that had a hold on my blood vessels, I was both restless and uncomfortable in my body. It did not make any sense at all, but something quite unrestrained urged me to go for a walk. With no room for negotiation, I donned my rain slicker and responded to its prompting.
I am not entirely sure if it was the intensity of the headache or some other cause, but it was a walk like no other. First, everything felt LOUD! It was an audible odyssey. It also held a strange sense of communion…with EVERYTHING. As you might imagine, I did not share the trails with a lot of people. At this point, it had been raining for hours and it felt highly likely anyone I was meeting along the way was someone who knowingly chose to BE in the rain. This carried both a unifying and strangely unpretentious quality to it.
At one point, I heard a man singing in full voice. I looked around to see where it was coming from and discovered an older, rather rotund man jogging bare chested on an adjacent trail. Unwilling to interrupt his joy, we both agreed to smile and wave. In that exchange, I remember feeling both a keen affection and profound appreciation for the access I had to his unedited expression. There was something about running in the rain that gave this gentleman permission to be in the world exactly as he wanted to be. He had a song to sing, and with no expectant social reprisal to contend with, he simply sang.
I continued on, enjoying how my sense of hearing had created a uniquely sustained and profound sense of presence. Then I heard an odd thwapping sound and discovered my shoelace had become untied. As I crouched down to retie it, I noticed a bubble briskly travel past me in a stream of water rushing towards the drain.
Initially, it was the speed that caught my attention. But then I noticed, my larger-than-life soundtrack seemed to be reduced and the pace of life was amplified. Everything felt like it was moving fast and then ridiculously slow. It was in this state that I became captivated by the raindrops, the ripples, and the bubbles they were creating.
As I stood in the rain, watching individuated raindrops merge, dance, swirl and create a brilliant array of affect all around me, I had my moment of clarity. It was as if the water spoke, “We are all the same, just different expressions with different results.”
I am not usually curious about the laws of physics, (another conversational legacy…) but I wondered what exactly were the conditions that created the bubbles and what were the fragile pockets of air encountering along the surface that broke them. I cannot explain it, but somehow, my mind concluded this was a metaphor for our words and conversational exchanges.
Watching water drop from the sky in one form, and transition both itself and others into dynamic new forms clarified that YOU.logy is not about you OR me. It is a shared experience. We are the water. Diverse in form, but one and the same. What affects you, affects me. How we express ourselves influences our external environment and our internal condition.
Do we want our interactions with each other to create bubbles or to burst them? Do we want to bring something to the surface that has been trapped within someone? Or do we want to create the surface tension that ends its presence? What conversational legacy do you want to create?
We all have sound bites from our past that influence how we see ourselves. Many of them have a ripple effect that continues decades after they were said to us. There is no doubt, words have a legacy. But what is conversational legacy? How do you know you have one…or created one? Let me provide a couple of everyday examples.
Since launching my blog in April, I have received feedback that some visitors were being alerted to security risks on the site. This, of course, was troubling. Because I want my site to gain readership, I was committed to finding a solution. Initially, I found articles suggesting it was likely images with problematic links. I did some behind the scenes work, and developed a new process when designing a post that guaranteed a clean new link to each image. Yet, the problem persisted.
Now several weeks past my launch, I became frustrated enough with the dead ends that I did the one thing I absolutely abhor; I called my web host provider. With dread, I dialed the number and explained the problem I was experiencing. I tried to drown out my ego’s insistence that there are only two possible outcomes from this interaction. I was either going to meet someone who would ask me to perform tasks that I would have no idea how to do. Or they would take advantage of my ignorance and convince me to buy something that I didn’t actually need and wouldn’t solve the problem. Either way, I was convinced I would come out feeling like an idiot.
Wait, what was I carrying into this interaction?
Well, when I was a young adult, computers were slowly becoming a larger presence in the work environment and dealing with their idiosyncrasies became a normal part of day-to-day operation. I can be an eager problem solver, and I remember the fateful day when I volunteered to call tech support about a software glitch we were experiencing while servicing clients.
At the time, my perspective was that computers were a new phenomenon, and everyone struggled to have successful interactions with them. Well, the tech support personnel I had the good fortune of interacting with, had a monumentally different view.
I met his presence with optimism and an enthusiastic appreciation, as I conveyed what we were experiencing. His response to me felt less than hospitable. I figured If he’s good with computers, he may not be so great with people. Not a fair assessment, for sure, but it allowed his tone to pass for ‘acceptable.’
He used language I did not understand, and I quite naively acknowledged I did not know what he meant. As he used different words to describe what he wanted me to do, I noticed he started talking louder and slower, as if he were talking to a child. In the process, I felt demeaned but persisted because I also recognized I did, in fact, understand what he was asking me to do. I just did not know his vocabulary.
This pattern of communication continued throughout our entire exchange, and he did nothing to hide the level of disdain he felt for my ignorance. We were successful in solving the problem, but it was not without consequence in how I viewed my computer knowledge and skills. He was 100% effective in convincing me I was well behind the curve on computer competency. That was nearly 3 decades ago, and I still believe his view of my ability.
Even though I have successfully interfaced with computer software for decades and developed customized systems needed to run our consignment art gallery, I still doubt my competency. That, my friends, is a conversational legacy.
And whether we are aware of it or not, a conversational legacy is not just the ripple effect we create externally. How we make others feel affects us too. We know what it feels like when we have buoyed someone up. We do not always know when it has happened, which is a major cornerstone of YOU.logy, but we know it creates a current of connection.
I was recently traveling with a friend, and we passed an individual who was quite active in approaching cars to seek financial assistance. My friend admitted to me that she feels quite triggered by this individual’s consistent presence on the route she uses to get home. I said, “It makes sense; you are so empathetic. I am sure their daily presence hits that sensitive and kind part of you that cares about their experience. I totally understand how that would be uncomfortable and challenging for you.
A few days later she sent me a text message saying, “I took your comment to heart (in a good way) about how much I try to please people, so I am really happy to report I’ve gone past the individual two times now and haven’t felt any angst. Seriously, it was a great observation that I really needed to hear. Thank you for that!” That, too, is a conversational legacy!
And let’s be honest, we all know how satisfying it can feel to level someone when we are stressed out or frustrated. But do we not also get a sick feeling, sometimes only minutes later, when we realize how disrespectful our choice of words was?
I was recently processing a refund for a client and asked her the same question I was trained and had asked hundreds of people before her. “Our system is designed to send the credit back to the original card you used to purchase, is that card still active and with you?”
The woman’s head jerked back, her eyebrows furrowed, she shook her head and with an accusing tone she said, “What does that even mean?” I attempted to answer her question, but she interrupted me and said, “I literally have never been asked that question by anyone, anywhere, EVER!”
Again, I tried to explain that with all the ways our credit cards can be compromised or lost, we just wanted to make sure that there had not been any need for her to cancel that card or wait for a new one.”
With the corners of her nose now pulled upright, she once again shook her head and said, “If you think about it, that question makes no sense at all. I was here just two days ago. I thought you read the receipt, but apparently, I gave you more credit than you deserve.”
I looked her in the eyes and said, “I can tell from your reaction, you have misunderstood the intention of my question. I would like to help us arrive at an understanding, but you don’t seem interested in doing that. So, I have credited your account, and I hope you have a better day.”
We each had a conversational legacy in that exchange. I am proud that I could maintain a modicum of kindness towards her. But I also know I started our interaction completely committed to creating a positive “bubble” experience and I ended it feeling reduced and closed off from her.
I don’t hold out a lot of expectation that this woman will do any bit of self-reflection around that exchange. But if my intended meaning does finally seep into her awareness, I know she is not going to feel great about how she spoke to me. And that actually saddens me.
Why should we engage in YOU.logy? Because kindness, appreciation and generosity have a ripple effect both inwardly and outwardly. As do their opposites. Do you want to fill someone or diminish them? Do you want to create bubbles or burst them? How do you want to feel afterward? Connected or separate?
Tell us about some of your conversational legacies.
One response to “What’s Your Conversational Legacy?”
I love this! Yes we are all connected and the sooner we can realize this fully, the better off we all will be. What we say and how we say it matters quite a lot in my view. Keep up the enlightening work!