Way To Go, Godot!

People communicate with each other constantly, and in ways we hardly ever even realize. You heard that right: even a truly prolific writer is unlikely to ever match in written words the sheer volume of information that is constantly transmitted to the people around them, in the form of body language, expressions, small gestures, barely detectable fluctuations in muscle tone, in vocal cadence. Beyond these measurable types of physical communication, there’s another level of communication buried under and between the language itself. It occurs just as automatically as body language and just as pervasively. And, like body language, we usually don’t even realize we’re doing it.

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For thousands of years, life was simple. You spent most of the day dawdling around with your family. You dozed, made arts and crafts, tended fires, gathered nuts and berries. The only time this lifestyle got hectic was when it was time to track and kill an animal, or when it was time for you to run away from an animal that had it in mind to track and kill you. Simple, acute stressors that you could fully recover from within an hour. There were other sources of stress, of course: fighting for dominance within your group, and fighting against other groups. These probably occurred relatively infrequently, and probably usually didn’t last that long.

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