#underlying

"The way I feel about him is like a heartbeat -- soft and persistent, underlying everything"

Investigating a bug only to find huge underlying issues

One of the major deceptive tricks our minds play upon us is to lead us to believe that we know what other people mean just because we can hear their words. But often what someone is trying to say is very different what actually comes out of their mouth. We therefore have to undertake a special kind of translation, moving from listening to interpreting. The need for translation is especially prominent in relationships. Our Romantic culture stresses sincerity and openness, which can make the idea of translation feel like an insult to another’s directness of heart. Yet it may frequently be much kinder and more loving to dig beneath the surface meaning of words in search of a partner’s real but more bashful, complex or vulnerable underlying emotional intention. ‘I hate you’ might not mean this at all; it might just be a plea to be noticed and cared for. ‘I’m fine’ is unlikely to indicate that one is fine, it is almost always a sign that revealing one’s real complaint and anger has brought on intolerable feelings of weakness and exposure. In an ideal future, we might have in our ears little devices that could translate people’s words into what they actually meant. We would hear (via our discreet, brushed steel appliances) not what they overtly said, but what they were attempting to communicate. In the meantime, we must take up the challenge of picking up on hints rather than looking out only for direct statements; we must learn to wisely interpret rather than just to listen to one another.