When Words Fail Us

This week marks the anniversary of the day I became a mother. All these years later, I’ll never forget what I said when I looked into my baby son’s eyes for the first time.

‘Hello.’

A single word that held so much joy and hope and fear.

There are moments that arrive without warning. The unexpected diagnosis. The reluctant goodbye at the gate. The first time you’re all alone with your newborn in the dead of the night, when you feel the weight of everything you can’t possibly control.

At times like these, we reach for words. Because that’s how we make sense of what’s troubling us. We want to name the feeling so we can carry it or share it with someone else and say, ‘Listen. Let me tell you what’s happening.’

Language has always been how we make sense of our experience. It’s how we try to reach each other when everything else falls away. But sometimes we’re so overwhelmed by the moment that words fail us.

We’ve built entire industries on the idea that communication means more timely words that arrive faster. Yet we feel more disconnected and disillusioned than ever. You pick up your phone and the world rushes in — brutal wars, dire warnings, the relentless scroll of things falling apart. We live in a moment where talk is cheap, and words cost almost nothing to produce. Thousands of them can be summoned in less time than it takes to decide what we want to say. The volume and velocity have never been greater.

We instinctively understand, even if we can’t quite articulate it, that we are drowning in language and parched for meaning. That the words arriving in our inbox and our feeds are no match for the times we’re living in.

Connection doesn’t begin with the first word or end with the last. It happens in the moment before we speak when the other person feels, even just briefly, that they are not alone with whatever they’re carrying.

The weight of a horrific news day or a heavy year is often too large for language. That’s not a failure of words but the reality of human experience. Maybe it’s also an opportunity to show up more fully and say, ‘I hear you, I feel that way too.’

It’s not always possible to find the right words at the right moment. And maybe that isn’t what we should aspire to or expect from each other. Perhaps presence, not perfect words, is the point. Being here now, walking alongside each other on the journey.

In a world awash with words, perhaps the most human thing we can do is listen to each other’s hearts.

Image credit: Jon Tyson