Never Alone.

*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.