Day 26: The gift of communication

As a Speech Pathology Student I have been taught the value of communication. I have sat in a number of lectures in which I have been required to communicate a message without speaking, only using gross motor movements, or only using non-verbal noises. When you are required to communicate a message with a constraint placed on you usual method of communicating, you understand the difficulty and frustration that some people face every day due to injury or disability.

Communicating with those around us is something we do every day. It is something which we have done since the day we were born. We learnt to talk at a very young age and by the age of 3 our vocabulary is expanding rapidly. We can verbalise our thoughts. We can have conversations with others regarding subjects as boring and simple as the weather, to those deep and meaningfuls involving deep biblical reasoning or our most hidden thoughts and emotions. We can ask questions when we don't understand. We can tell people good news. We can share bad news. We can teach others. We can argue with others, and we can persuade them to agree with us. Think about all of what we have. How much of our life involves communication. Now imagine your communication skills if you didn't have all of it. Imagine you had a stroke and as a result it is really hard to formulate what you have in your head and put it into words, or you have extreme word finding difficulties and by the time you find the word you are thinking of the conversation has moved on, or you may think you are saying the right thing but it comes out as gibberish and no one can understand you. And then there's the flip side where you can't understand what is being said or follow instructions. And then there is pragmatics, all the social rules of language. The use of tone in our voice, verbal expression, the volume in our voice, the use of facial expression, our body language. There is so much that we just learn automatically when it comes to language and we can imagine life without it. Being able to communicate is such a gift, it is something which we use all of the time yet we don't always realise the true value of it all.

The next time you talk to someone think about what you have and be thankful for it.