On Getting Stuck

My philosophy professor has a stutter. He described his stutter in two words: "getting stuck". I found this to be a wonderfully simple and effective description of his condition -- and as I about it more, I started wondering why getting stuck is so bad. What is it about getting stuck that we as humans find annoying, or embarrassing, or intolerable? Is it our need to keep moving forward, making progress? Is it our thirst for variety, novelty, stimulation? Is it our goal-oriented society driving us to be "productive"?

In the case of stuttering, it was none of these things. Our brains, my professor explained, have a tendency to fill in words when we're listening to people. This tendency, normally imperceptible, became immediately, glaringly obvious whenever my professor got stuck. It was the linguistic version of Google autofill, and it naturally led to a second, more actionable tendency: The urge to complete an unfinished word for him. This, our professor warned, was the exact wrong thing to do. If we chose to race him to the end of a word, he would most certainly lose, and that would only make the stuttering worse -- because stuttering, as he explained, is a social disorder. Most people who stutter will not get stuck when talking to a dog or a baby, because it's the specific act of trying to communicate an idea to someone else that triggers getting stuck. In a sense, stuttering is the human difficulty of self-expression made manifest and visceral. It's a difficulty we've all experienced.

I noticed myself doing a lot of autofilling throughout the class. Most times, I autofilled the word correctly. These were the cases when I personally experienced the reason stuttering is considered an impediment. Whenever I successfully predicted the word he was going to say, I felt my time had been somehow wasted. But then I started wondering: Why was it a waste of time to wait for someone who had gotten stuck?

In telling us how to respond to his stutter, our professor asked simply for our patience. The best case for his stutter, he told us, was dead air. Silence. So whenever he got stuck, we simply sat and waited. At first, the waiting exposed an uncomfortable impatience in me. I did not like spending precious half-seconds of lecture time in silence. Looking back, this was an entitled Wei to think. I was a mere student, after all, and to think my time was somehow being wasted in the presence of a guy who'd spent years and years of his life reading philosophical literature and publishing papers in respected journals was simply wrong. My time was not being wasted; I was just being impatient.

After a while, I realized my impatience wasn't even the worst of it. See, I didn't manage to autofill my professor's words correctly every time. At some moments, I anticipated one word, but my professor said something entirely different. These moments were humbling. They reminded me of the following quote by the Dalai Lama:

"When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But when you listen, you may learn something new."

My failed autofills betrayed a subconscious arrogance I held. I automatically assumed I knew what my professor was going to say before he'd even said it, and I was proven wrong in an immediate and direct way. By shining such a bright spotlight on my bad assumption, my professor's speech patterns have caused me to reconsider my approach toward conversation -- not just with him, but with people in general. I became more conscientious of the bad expectations and assumptions I'd been unknowingly smuggling into all of my conversations. I realized I needed to approach conversations with a more open, humble mind. To be still and listen.

As a consequence of my failed autofills, I became more interested in what my professor was saying. I set an intention to stop autofilling and listen with an open mind. While I wasn't successful every time, this intention still gave me a greater enjoyment and engagement with his lecture. I hung on to his words with eager anticipation. It was a more mindful, present state of listening, a state was far superior to my default setting.

There are many things in life we find annoying, or boring, or inconvenient. It's the most natural thing in the world to let them annoy us, bore us, and inconvenience us. I'm lucky my professor's stutter did not do any of these things to me. Instead, his stutter taught me valuable lessons in listening, patience, and mindfulness, and these lessons revealed an even deeper, more universal truth: Anything can teach us. On the road of self-improvement, nothing is an obstacle.