by Charles H. Crawford
On a recent pleasingly cool morning, I had the window open partway to listen to the quiet respite of it all. Suddenly the stillness was broken by two caws from a crow, answered by another crow nearby. Then their conversation was over — no more sounds, just quiet.
I wondered to myself just what they had said to each other. Did they understand anything from their exchange or was it just some sort of automatic response system to notify one another that each was around? Maybe I was indulging in the superior human position of assuming I knew what they were doing when in fact I had not the least idea. Of course it did not matter much to them, but I could not stop musing about how the exchange either meant nothing at all, or was in fact something of importance to the crows. I would never really know.
Have you ever left a conversation with the feeling that there really was no conversation at all? You know, those “how ya doing?” and “pretty good, and you?” kinds of conversations. Or maybe you participated in one of those exchanges of opinions where neither side did much more than repeat its own position?
How often in our advocacy do we simply lecture another person on how right we are? What do they learn? What have we learned? Like two crows in the morning silence, have we really communicated or simply made noises too familiar to lead to any kind of pursuant effort?
We must make an effort to turn our advocacy conversations into meaningful exchanges, for if our conversations are perceived as little more than caw-caw-cawing into the silence, we will have a hard time making the kind of difference we want to make.