Hot Potato

Conversations fascinate me. I know, wild.

They’re sneaky little things, making their way to hearts, tightening their grip on veins and bungee-jumping. Arriving unannounced at the doors of minds and staying a tad bit too long. They’re loaded with words, for better or for worse. Their absence is a strategy, meant to be tactful but often employed foolishly.

To understand and to be understood, we are formally educated in language: tenses to indicate passage of time, adjectives to give our speech some character, prepositions to make sense of physical space. We spend all this time in the world and still struggle to grasp the verbal nuances—like a surfer in the ocean, attempting to stay upright but knocked over by a wave (of emotion). From an impressionable age, we are told to toughen our skin to bear the brunt of communication, but I wonder why we aren’t taught to soften it, baby it just a little.

Conversations are a funny little-big thing. You hear, sure, but you feel more (or is it just me making this deal out of it?). After creative procrastination, I come to the point: perception vs intention is hot potato.

One sees oneself with tinted glasses and a baggy t-shirt—comfortable, forgiving, a little loose around the edges. The tricky part is, we don’t get to grade on intention alone.

Hot potato.

Let’s get real, there is a cognitive bias at play here. It is human tendency to believe that what we mean is obvious. That our tone, our context, our internal disclaimers are explicit. But are they? We believe in our clarity, but in reality, it is often incomplete. Why did I choose the word incomplete? I’ll borrow Rumi’s idea of going beyond right and wrong, and focus instead on the attempt to find the field.

Here’s how I think one can cool the potato: to try and say what we mean a little more clearly. To recognise that “I didn’t mean it like that” doesn’t undo the experience of how it was received. If we are honest, “it wasn’t my intention” is less of an explanation and more of an exit.

I say this with full awareness of my habits, for I am a Scorpio and no amount of “but I am cusp” can exempt me from my misspoken words. Be that as it may, I try to hold my inherent sensitivity accountable to my expression. And when I fall through the gaps, I sucker-punch my resistance, take a cue from Justin Bieber, and just say sorry.

So, the question perhaps is not “why did they take it that way?” Rather, it could, and should, be “what did I put out there?”

Conversations are not just about expression; they are about impact. Impact, fortunately or unfortunately, is not entirely in our control, but it is not entirely outside it either.

Now, I am a big proponent of authenticity, and do not recommend becoming hyper-careful, measuring every word until conversations lose their spontaneity. But might I suggest taking a little more ownership of what we say, instead of outsourcing the entire experience to how it is received. To pause, occasionally, before defaulting to defence. To replace “that’s not what I meant” with “that’s not what I meant, let me try again.”

Conversations, for all their unpredictability, are still our most human attempt at reaching each other.

If we’re going to keep sending pieces of ourselves into other people’s minds, the least we can do is be a little more deliberate about what we send.