Storytelling Starters ~ Lost for Words
It can be a dismaying feeling. The husband of a friend has died. You really don’t know what to say except for a lame ‘I’m so sorry’.
Another friend is in turmoil. She doesn’t know what to do. Shall she finally move to the country? She’s thought about it for years. Has she finally got the courage or the means to do it now? You really can’t say much that is helpful. Instead, you just listen.
You enter a Cathedral. The roof is high, the pillars that hold up the roof are mighty. The quiet inside the building is awesome. You don’t want to speak. Nor do you want anyone to speak to you. In every sense, the building brings you into its silence.
You watch the television news. The pictures of what’s going on in the Ukraine horrify you and sadden you. Children, women, families leaving their homes and moving who knows where. When will they be able to come back? Will they ever want to? Will there be a home there to come back to? What is there to be said?
In so many situations, you can feel a bit useless. You simply don’t have the words to communicate your dismay or your fellow-feeling. Maybe you can manage a squeeze of the hand of a person in turmoil. Maybe your silence speaks for itself. In so many situations, words feel inadequate.
And so far I’ve not mentioned my own feeling of uselessness this morning when I went downstairs. I made a cup of tea and, for lack of the sense of purpose that is equivalent to being lost for words, I sat down in front of the large jigsaw puzzle – Signs of the Zodiac – that is currently spread out on our kitchen table. A jigsaw puzzle is a useful thing. It doesn’t need words except when you feel obliged to mutter to your spouse something such as, ‘This jigsaw is sooo hard.’
Ah well. I felt very sad yesterday when as the game went on ‘my boys’ – i.e. the Welsh rugby team – looked like they weren’t going to win. They didn’t. In many ways they played very well. But they didn’t win.
I also felt sad this week when it felt impossible to talk with a member of my family in any way that made any sense.
Ah well, quite probably all that can be done in such circumstances is realise that times will change or, rather, the nature of the occasion will come to seem different. Appropriate words may then come to my aid. But meantime it may be useful to reconcile myself to the fact that words aren’t always necessary or useful. A smile or a groan, or just silence, may in fact communicate just as much.
But I still battle with myself, and probably always will, on any occasion when the words I seek don’t come to my mouth. Aren’t words my business? Well, yes, they are. Yet I need to accept, as do most sensible people, that words aren’t the only way of communicating.
PS: Flowers certainly speak. Although they don’t themselves have words, they communicate all kinds of things – fragility, beauty, delicacy, the passage of time. And I’m delighted to say that my garden has lots of different flowers in it right now. They don’t owe anything at all to me. Or if they do in the sense that it was maybe me who planted them, it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten. Yet as they flower, they make me smile and perhaps manage to come up with such simple words as, ‘Oh look.’