The Inefficiency of Human Commutation
And Why It's Still A Beautiful Thing
I read about how ants communicate with each other by touching their antennae, and I felt that is fantastic! So many times I felt myself lack of skills of communicating my real thoughts to the people around, for quite a long time I dreamed of, it would be nice if I could tell my true feelings via some kind of “antennae”, like a handshake, a hug, or even just letting people look at my eyes, see how sincere I am. If I could tweak any part of the human DNA, I’d add the antennae.
But recent years I’ve come to realize that, actually I’ve been using that fantasy as an excuse of my poor communication skill. I blamed it so I could escape from that thing, I justified it as if I was nothing wrong, it was a flaw of human nature, life would be easier if we could communicate like ants.
Apparently I was wrong. There’s a huge difference between just thinking inside your head than verbalizing it and walking your talk.
When you are in school, you’re guaranteed to hang out with your friends, it’s granted, it doesn’t take too much effort. But once you step into the social society, it takes quite a lot of efforts to physically hangout with your friends. It takes your time, your attention, even you money and resource to do so. But all these efforts, because of the inefficiency, it means something, and your friends would appreciate it. It means in the busy world where we want more and more but the 24 hours today just feels less than last year, we choose to spend the time together with our family, our friends. It doesn’t happen by default, we make it happen.
It’s not rare that your good friend lives in the same city yet you’ve only met once a year. Some relationships do need your effort to maintain. It’s not a bad word, it doesn’t mean your relationship is not sincere. Because it matters, that’s why you need to put efforts, otherwise the world has all sorts of ways to get us derailed from the essentials.
So, now I don’t want any “magic antennae” anymore, all I want is to be more intentional about how I spend time with people who are truly important in my life, and really put it into action.
Again, it makes quite a difference, if your thoughts are sincere, you got to find a way to verbalize it, to act it, to find the exact word to describe it, to sacrifice your resources to make it happen. It’ll pay off eventually.
