There's a feckless panoply to pick from. Thought-Terminating Clichés reign supreme in this unproductive arena. It is what it is. That's life. So it goes. This too shall pass. It could be worse. Here we go again. It will all work out. There effect is emotive and mechanical. They give off an effect that something profound has been said. But the profundity is a ruse, an illusion created by a sense of being dumbfounded by an inability to respond. These sentences function mechanically like a punctuation, as in, a punctuation without a sentence. Even a question mark is impossible to respond to if there is no substance preceding the punctuation. Such linguistic implements are the equivalent of turning and walking away from a conversation. They not only fail to provide a means to further discussion, they emphatically kill the possibility. 

 

Defenders might squawk about intentions: there's good intention behind saying such things. It's a comfort to be told "It will all work out."

 

There's two problems with such buffoonery. Specifically regarding "It will all work out" the simple truth is that it certainly does not all work out. Every time someone says this to me, I point out that it did not work out for the malaria ridden child who just died of starvation in sub-Saharan Africa. This of course is, quite negative, and comes off as offensive because it's a backhand to the good intentions behind the person sputtering clichés. But perhaps a backhand is deserved in the now memed old-school-batman-comic slap way. Why? Because these linguistic pacifiers are a searing indication of cognitive laziness, which highlights the other problem with such buffoonery: 

 

 

Good intentions only matter so much. If good intentions consistently do not match actual outcomes, then good intentions become increasingly meaningless. If the disconnect between intentions and outcomes remains unchanged, then it's a sign that either this person is incapable of changing in response to the feedback from reality that they are not having the desired effect, or they simply do not care enough to dedicate the time and attention required to observe, understand, learn and change in adequate measure to resolve the insidious inequity. In short: a person is either too stupid or just doesn't care. Or worse: both. However, chances are it's only the later. Unproductive discussions about intelligence aside it's a robust fact of life that if someone cares about something, it generates a nearly inexhaustible well of energy to draw from in order to learn and understand: even the stupidest person can change when their heartstrings are sufficiently plucked by some unintended consequence. 

 

It's likely that the majority of language we employ is the result of habit. One need only wonder and ask: how can someone with many many decades behind them be such a bad communicator? Doesn't so much history force practice? Unfortunately the answer is no. The years require only a habitual way of communicating in order to get through all that time. Improvement only comes from conscientious practice, and most habit is unconscious automata. Most communication is a set of automatic linguistic patterns. After years of lukewarm communication, the rails of expression are more like ruts of habit. The consistent disparity between intention and outcome is not resolved, but it's manageable, at least in an emotional sense - the consequences are not so bad and they fail to bother heartstrings. Even the emotional fallout of poor communication can become just another part of the habitual pattern. Here we go again. And in these ways whole populations can spend many thousands of hours practicing without ever advancing beyond the s of a simple novice. 

 

 

The question at the beginning should now carry with it an appropriate amount of horror: What do we say when we don't know what to say? The consequences of how we each individually answer this question have tremendous and far reaching impact. The answer to this simple question may readily define the health of all our relationships. And if at this point, you, dear reader find yourself grasping in frustration: Well what are you supposed to say! If you don't know what to say, and nothing comes to mind and you have good intentions and you want to provide some comfort, what do you say!

There's one root issue weaving between, around and underneath this whole topic. It's silence. It makes us uncomfortable. I'll always remember asking my grandmother: why do you always have the T.V. on? Her answer was so candid I don't think she registered the magnitude of what it meant. She said something to the effect of "When Harry was dying I didn't want to think about anything, so I put the T.V. on so I didn't have to think about it, and then after he was gone, it was just comforting to have the sound."

 

Sound. That's it. Why is it quiet in libraries? Because people are trying to think. Sound, particularly human voices, hijacks thought. All these linguistic pacifiers merely fill the space drawing a compromise between communicating in a way that really doesn't help (and may even truly hurt) our relationships and staving off the horror of silence.

 

As Blaise Pascal once said "All of man's problems arise from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

 

I'd take it one step further and say many of man's shit relationships arise from his inability to think quietly in the presence of a loved one until something better to say comes to mind. 

 

The answer to that question: what to say when you don't know what to say, is to not speak, but sit with the issue. Allow your mind to explore the topic in a deeper and broader way. 

 

Often in conversation we are tailoring our own mind to try and see the point of the other - which is a good thing, one of the very best things. And so when a distressed loved one comes to the fraught terminus of their concern, we arrive with them at a confusing injunction.

 

But a good listener doesn't just follow the trail of their companion in conversation. A great listener understands that healthy conversation benefits most from a dynamic set of perspectives. 

 

We've all had the experience of offering one or two points to consider and being immediately shot down. Again, it's the emotive aspect that is the problem. We feel shut down instead of realizing: gee, I'm talking to a relatively intelligent person who has clearly spent a LOT more time thinking about this than I have, should it really be a butt-hurt surprise that they've already considered the points I bring up?

Again, the answer is to use silence as a tool. It creates a surprising amount of space. Neil Gaiman, when questioned about how he thinks up all his ideas for stories has said: I just allow myself to be bored. After a while the mind begins producing ideas to entertain itself, and I just write them down. 

 

Sit with silence, sit with the issue, and, if you care, new ideas will arrive. But it's important to realize that they never arrive with the same alacrity as we expect. We've been habituated by linguistic patterns that responses are supposed to come at a quick interval, like a volley of tennis. Silence in tennis means the game is over. But the problem is that conversation, despite it's usual similarity to the back-and-forth of tennis is not tennis. 

 

Good conversation is chess. The main object of chess is to try and see something about the situation that your opponent hasn't realized. This is exactly what the object of conversation is when we don't know what to say. The answer is not to say the first innocuous thing that comes to mind. That would be like blundering a game of chess by moving any old piece just for the sake of hearing the sound of the piece hit the board when you place it on a new square. The answer is to sit with the conundrum in silence, to focus on it from many angles, to consider all of its parts and its possible directions. To work hard to try and find some aspect your companion in conversation has failed to see, something that might truly help that person you care deeply about.