The Value of Speech

If there is one thing I learned in France, it is the value of non-verbal communication. Not having a massive vocabulary, I could get by, but only on the minimum of speaking. The rest I had to do nonverbally. And it was nice. It was nice not to have to follow up my "bonjour" with some kind of random inane comment. It was nicer, actually, to savor that moment of connection without dropping in extra stuff it didn't need. I felt like more a person, actually. I felt more solid, more polite.

But in America it seems there is almost always an expectation that you are going to say something clever. Or make conversation. Or maybe that's just me. Maybe it's just too easy when you know the language.

The true value of this was brought home for me last weekend, where I was hanging out with a guy who, in my opinion, talked way too much. I mean, I like a chatty guy. But he could not leave even one moment of free air space, and he would go off on tangents about things I really felt like I didn't need to know and had nothing to do with what we were talking about. It was all I could do to steer him back to the conversation.

And what it amounted to was a kind of verbal worrying. He was making me anxious with all of his talking. I thought he was a fairly nice guy. But I really thought if he sort of didn't say some of the things he was saying, I would have liked him a lot more. At some points I had to kind of tell him to stop talking. Most of the time, he didn't know he was doing it.

By the end of the night, it was practically unbearable.

So we said goodnight. And afterwards I had to wonder - do I do that? Do I talk so much sometimes that it amounts to a kind of worrying that I don't even know that I am doing? I hope not. But it's possible. I used to know this guy in High School who would sometimes just decide not to speak for an entire day. You could talk to him, but he wouldn't respond in words. It was interesting. Maybe I should try that. Or maybe I should try to pretend I am speaking French and I don't know the language. It might take some of the pressure off. Hm. We'll see. Or maybe I should just move to France.