A World Without Lines

He never knew what colors looked like. They told him the sky was blue and the grass was green but those were just words to him. He imagined the world through sound and touch and in that world people were just voices. They were never black or white, tall or short, rich or poor. They were just people. 

He had never looked at someone and judged them before they spoke. He had never seen a face and assumed what kind of person they were. He only knew kindness by the way someone spoke and cruelty by the way someone stayed silent or when someone yelled. 

To him laughter had no shape and love had no face. He recognized people by the sincerity in their speech and the hesitation in their pauses. He understood honesty through steady voices and deceit through forced smiles. His world was not divided by appearances or controlled by assumptions. His world was just sound and movement and emotion.

Sometimes people felt sorry for him because he could not see but he wondered if they were the ones missing out. They saw too much and heard too little. They judged before they understood and divided before they connected. They fought over shades of skin and shapes of bodies while he only cared about the way someone made him feel.  

He would never see a sunrise or a rainbow or a field of flowers but he would also never see hatred in someone’s eyes or disgust in their expression. He would never see the lines that people drew between themselves and others. His world was not broken by difference or ruined by prejudice. His world was free.  

Maybe blindness was not the absence of sight but the absence of bias. Maybe the ones who could see were the ones who failed to look deeper.

How Much Explaining Is Too Much?

 

There is a certain exhaustion that comes with explaining yourself. At first it feels necessary because you do not want to be misunderstood. But after a while you start noticing that people are not interested in hearing it anymore. They say you explain too much and they ask you to stop. They get tired before you even finish. And that leaves you wondering if you should even explain.  

The need to explain does not come out of nowhere. Maybe it is because silence has worked against you before. Maybe people have misjudged you one too many times. Or maybe it is just how your mind works, You just want things to be clear. Or you want others to see what you see. But clarity is not always welcome. Some people do not want explanations. Some do not care enough to listen. And even those who do, will not have the patience forever.  

This dilemma can be understood through "Relevance theory", by scientists Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson within the field of pragmatics. Their theory argues that human communication is guided by the expectation of relevance, and so listeners naturally interpret information based on how useful and necessary it is to them. Over explaining happens when the speaker provides more detail than the listener finds relevant, leading to frustration. When people ask you to stop explaining, it is not always about the length of your words but their perceived usefulness. At some point, the effort to clarify becomes exhausting, not because the explanation is wrong, but because the listener has already decided how much they care to understand.

That is when you have to decide if it is worth it. Some things need to be said but not everything does. Some misunderstandings clear up with time. Others never will, no matter how much you try. And if people have already made up their minds about you no explanation will change that.  

So maybe the question is not whether you should explain, but who actually deserves an explanation. Because sometimes silence is not just an absence of words but a decision in itself.