Today I sat for an extended meditation instead of the usual daily duration of 10 minutes. Every time I do an extended session I meet a familiar distraction: pain.
I’ve written about my experience with pain in meditation multiple times but today as my legs lost circulation it felt a bit nostalgic for some reason. Ah! This is how it used to feel, and this is how frustrating it used to feel to be in pain.
The breaking point of pain was recognizing that it is, in terms of physical quality, no different from any other neural signal processed by my brain. My eyes looking at something and recognizing it as a flower, it’s the same neural process as me recognizing my ankle about to fall off from my leg.
I have never had an interest in learning French. The only European language I’ve had an interest in learning was Spanish simply because I live in California, but even that I didn’t really study even with tons of Spanish speakers around me. My only experience with French is about 300 days of Duolingo and that’s it.
I don’t think my French is exceptional or that I’m a particularly gifted language person, but many friends and people have told me that they were surprised by my French. I get why that is, because I’m really, really speaking French.
To elaborate on that a little bit, I’m speaking French instead of trying to speak French. I’m speaking French instead of communicating with them. The difference is subtle but I think this is what really makes all the difference.
Could I just say “Parlez-vous Anglais?” and proceed in English? Sure. Could I just say “Desolee, je ne parle pas Francais” and stop the conversation altogether? Yes, I could definitely do that. Could I just resort to body language mixed with Korean and English? I could do that as well. But I’m here to speak French, I’m here to learn French and even though it’s really hard… That’s what I have to do.
Believe it or not English was a second language for me. I just happened to learn it when I was very very young. As I was growing up in the United States I came across many people trying to learn English in different stages of their lives. I’ve seen kids in junior high learning English, high school, and college. Heck, I’ve even seen people trying to learn in their professional career. The general trend is that language is easier to learn when you’re young, but why is this? How do you learn a new language as an adult?
The immediately obvious reason is because you have more factors that make language learning difficult as an adult. There’s factors like shame/embarrassment and a lifelong habit of speaking a particular language, along with the lifelong habit of thinking in that language. As a kid you have less of those. But what do you have more of as a kid? I think that’s what we lose focus on as an adult.
As I’ve observed myself in the past and the children I’ve encountered over the years, children all have a lot more to say in general. They WANT to say something, they want to be heard. The feeling of being blocked by linguistic hurdles is not frustrating enough to deter that basic yet essential desire to communicate with another.
So I’m intentionally focusing on that, that heart-based desire to want to communicate in French. I can literally feel parts of my brain trying to form the synaptic bridges between neurons that contain separate words. And what’s interesting to note is that the more I do this, the more I see this from the other party as well.
I find myself frequently in this mixup of a situation where I’m speaking poor French to the other person and they’re speaking poor English to me. But because I am consciously, slowly speaking despite difficulties they reciprocate that to me. And in those conversations the moments of silence as we are finding the words in our head, they speak tons more than the words could ever convey.
The silence contains something words could never contain. And although this silence isn’t unique to situations like this where two inter-national people communicate with each other, we forget to listen to and appreciate the silence. As we speak our natural language with our same-tongued friends, words take more weight than space. Although it’s always there!
At the end of this writing there will be space until the next writing. What will we be communicating to each other in that space?
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
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