*A
reflection paper on the role of communication in our lives*
Every man will be an island. We will
all wake up alone. We will all go through our daily lives alone. No one will be
there for us to share our laughter with. No one will be there for us to share
our pain with. No one will be there to listen to our rants and to our stories. There
is no one but us.
Isolated. Distressed. Misunderstood.
Alone. That is life without communication, and that is no exaggeration.
We go through our daily lives with
constant communication. I am confident to say that we all need to communicate
to keep the status quo. With constant communication, we were all able to clear
out all the misunderstandings, to let other people know how we feel and what is
on our minds.
We can have an endless list if we
are to enumerate all the roles of communication in our daily lives. But what is
more important is not the “what” but the “how”.
How does communication affect our
lives?
At home, we have to communicate. We
have to tell our family how much we love them. They have to know what we think.
We have to inform them of what we need. We have to share to them what’s going
on in our lives. We also have to know what they need and we try our best to
fulfill their wishes. Our families also get to share to us and to make us feel
loved. When there are some unavoidable misunderstandings, we fix things by
communicating. We may not talk, but body language also does wonders. We may not
tell them how much we care or how thankful or sorry we are, but we may show it
through our actions.
At school or at work, we also
communicate. Our everyday lives inside the four walls of the classroom are full
of communication. We talk, people listen. Our classmates, co-workers,
professors, or colleagues talk, we listen. It’s a never-ending two-way process.
We communicate for us to understand each other. We communicate for us to
accomplish tasks. We communicate for us to establish good relationships with
the people around us. We communicate to survive a world full of strangers.
Alone, we also communicate with
ourselves. This is necessary. Sometimes, we are all so preoccupied with
everything that has to be done under time constraint and we forget to just stay
still even of a moment and talk to ourselves. Intra-personal communication is
just as important as inter-personal communication, and so this should not be
taken for granted. By talking to ourselves, we are able to know what we truly
feel. We are able to know what we need and how to keep up with the fast pace of
life. Most of the time, we do things because we have to, but not because we
want to. And more often than not, communication within ourselves could be just
the answer we need to bring back our lives right where we wanted it to be.
I have this case in point for
intra-personal communication. I was under the BS Mathematics and Science
Teaching degree program for three years here at UPLB. Without talking to
myself, I went on and on, year after year, trying to fit in to a different
world. It took me three years. Three years before I sat still and asked myself,
“What am I doing here?”. As I finally had the courage to talk to myself and to
ask myself where I really want to go and what I really want to do, I realized
that I am trying so hard to fit in a world not for me as I pretended to be
somebody I am not. And so I am already here, in a world where I know that will
hone the skills that I already have, and will make me a better person who knows
my worth. This resolution for me by myself is all because of communication.
No man is an island. We do not have
to wake up all alone. We do not have to go through our daily lives alone. There
are people will be there for us to share our laughter and our pain with. There
are those who are willing to listen to all our rants and to all our stories.
Because with communication, we are
never alone.
