Show don’t tell
Storytelling, conversations with precious people, being at the launch of a film company together with the ability to listen and observe revealed the value of show don’t tell.
Enabling The How #192. Reading time: 7 minutes
Ever since she was a child Chantal has loved the written word. She read avidly from a young age, wrote stories and poems from six years old and filled her descriptive passages with swathes of adverbs and adjectives. Later on in life she attended a creative writing retreat where she was introduced to the adage “Show don’t tell”.
This well-worn advice says that the story and characters are experienced through sensory details and actions that allow the reader to be immersed in the narrative while using their imagination to fill in the blanks and colour the scenes. Once you have an awareness of this technique you suddenly see lazy writing a book cover away.
In real life we make up our minds about other people by observing their behaviour and how we experience them. We hardly introduce ourselves by saying:
“Hi, I’m Sandra, I’m anxious, overworked, bordering on burnout but I love helping people and find it difficult to say No.”
“Hi Sandra, I’m Bob, I’m stressed, completely out of my depth at work with my new role and as a consequence I am overly aggressive and controlling.”
Imagine that.
Imagine if we had insight and awareness
Imagine if we had that level of insight and awareness about our circumstances and our reactions to what was going on in our lives? Imagine if we were that open and honest? And while we all roll around on the floor in fits of hysteria (yes, you too may be feeling overwhelmed, undervalued and tipping over the edge) the very idea that we would tell anyone how we were really feeling is preposterous.
Yet, when safe spaces are created people will open up and it doesn't have to be a coaching or therapy session. Sometimes it just feels okay to speak from the heart to someone even if you don’t know them that well. Sometimes there is an energy that radiates from the other person that says that it’s okay to speak your multiple thoughts, that there will be acceptance and acknowledgement of the messiness that makes us human. All human.
People who are like this are precious. We had the opportunity to have a few of these conversations over the course of the week. It was a refreshing change to just be as we were. Not having to hold back, hold in, and be careful gave our muscles a break, relaxed our minds and softened our senses.
Tread carefully around
Then there are events like the US elections, with all the hype, controversy and concern that surrounded it, that made it the kind of topic that one has to tread around very carefully. Like COVID-19 and the (non) debates about the vaccine that split families and turned neighbours into enemies, some topics evoke intense emotions. When there are intense emotions at play it is difficult to listen to each other.
Intense emotions cloud and cover the clarity of our thoughts. They suck us into a vortex of narrow, hawk-eye focus on our position, our views and our beliefs. There is no gap to allow another perspective in let alone the time to consider it. Our stress response spins us out like a top teetering and bobbing on a bumpy surface. If both parties are in this state then they bump into each other and veer away, bump in and veer away and sometimes topple over completely.
Matthew, who has specific views about current events, had to watch himself very carefully when confronted by people with differing opinions. If he felt the rise of irritation and the desire to jump into the fray to fling his views back in an uppercut of contempt he rather took a deep breath and listened instead.
With no judgement and armfuls of curiosity the wordy explosions were diffused and the relationships saved. With little real control about what happens across the ocean we can only observe behaviour which reveals a great deal more than what we are told.
When we are able to listen
When we are able to listen and look and take in the whole person as they speak, they are revealed to us in all their complex colour. To be able to sit undistracted by the exterior noise and notice how the person shows up reveals the prism of their being. Facets are uncovered that the light plays through, while their shadows hold the dark softly. It becomes a co-created exquisite experience for both parties.
An exquisite experience of a different but related kind was created at the launch party of Spot the Garden Gnome Films that we were invited to (Can you spot the gnome hidden in this issue…?). We were offered the opportunity to watch a range of short films produced by the young husband and wife team as part of the launch. One of these was called Noise and Neighbours, a delightful story, written by the husband, of the relationship that developed between a young girl learning the piano and her grouchy old neighbour who lived in the apartment below.
There was no dialogue, there were no words spoken. Instead, we were shown in a myriad of inventful ways how the relationship grew through body language, behaviour, and facial expression mixed with shared music notes, percussion, accompaniment and sound. We were taken on a moving excursion through time, metaphor and moments that left many of us choked up and in tears.
The spoken word is only part of the picture
Serendipitously we watched the documentary Music by John Williams about his life making music for the movies. It was a joyful adjunct to our experience on Saturday. Think Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, Schindler’s List - all music by John Williams. All memorable and moving and married in a symphony of sound and visuals. Think Jaws, and how the music is the shark before we ever get a glimpse of the monster.
These films, made fuller by sound and light, were a reminder that the spoken word, as powerful as it is, is only a minute part of the picture. The richness of an experience comes in being shown not told. It is the same with people and the stories they bring to the world. The fullness of a person lies not only in what they say but in how they show up. The fullness of our experience lies in how we, in turn, show up to them.
Engaging with another person is like a dance. It’s in the swaying between the words, the moving of our bodies as we cross and uncross our ankles and arms and the point at which our eyes meet or not, that we communicate. It’s how we touch each other without holding on and it’s in the music that hums in the energy around us. We meet, connect, disengage and move onto the next dancer who will show us something more about us and them.
When we show up and match what we tell others about us with our actions and expressions then the congruence opens up the doors for deeper connection. And so an offer, from The Dance by Oriah Mountain Dreamer:
I have sent you my invitation,
The note inscribed on the palm of my hand by the fire of the living.
Don’t jump up and shout, “Yes, this is what I want! Let’s do it!”
Just stand up quietly and dance with me.
Until next time.
Yours in feeling,
Matthew & Chantal
