From my journal entry:
May 27, 2018 8:42 PM
I’m sitting on the steps of Wroxton Abbey in Oxfordshire, England looking at the moon in broad daylight. It’s gets dark here much later than I’m used to. I walk over to the pond they have nearby and watch the newly hatched tadpoles. I turn to my left and decide to take walk along the tree lined pathways. Everything is so green here. This place reminds me of a fairy tale. I almost want to stop writing so I don’t have to look away.
In May 2018, I attended a 12-day seminar in Oxfordshire, England focusing on international corporate communication through a UK perspective. In those 12 days, we participated in more than 30 activities and lectures, visiting Oxford, Stratford Upon Avon, Bletchley Park and London, all the while staying in the remarkable structure that is Wroxton Abbey.
To say that this experience changed the way I view communication studies is an understatement. It started on our first day of class, when Professor Gary Radford asked us, “What is communication?”
We each gave him the textbook definitions we’d been taught, that communication is a multi-step process involving a transfer, receipt, and recognition of a message. He seemed visibly disappointed. He then talked of history and Shakespeare and literature, urging us to consider the fact that communication was much more than just a social scientific process. He told us to keep this original question in mind as we experienced all that this trip had to offer.
I did just that.
Continued journal entry:
I had a moment today in the abbey. I was in the library, staring at countless collections of books and writers. I was grazing my fingertips over the bindings of William Blake, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare when one of my classmates began to play the piano in the great hall. The sound drifted straight into the library and I caught myself in a feeling of perfect serendipity.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a reader. My first memory is of my mother taking me to a local bookstore. I spent hours in there trying to decide which book I wanted to delve into next. In my early college days, I studied English literature, but I soon grew anxious and weary that I wouldn’t be able to make a living by just analyzing 18th century poetry. So I gave it up.
But here I was, in the motherland of great writers—England, herself—in an abbey no less, surrounded by the writers I grew up with. I thought of one of my favorite memoirs, the author of which also happens to be one of my favorite chefs, Gabrielle Hamilton. In it, she talked about the roads we take to shape our lives. You think you’re choosing one road over the other, she says, but later on you find out that they re-converge.
Hamilton was speaking of her love of writing and cooking re-converging. In that moment, I felt my own re-convergence, of every choice I’ve ever made in my life leading to now. I’ve second-guessed myself many times before, but right there and then, that’s exactly where I needed to be. Right in the Wroxton library, staring at those books.
This is what Dr. Radford meant when he said there was more to communication than just a two-step flow, or at least this is what I took him to mean. Communication isn’t just about sending and receiving messages. It’s about a transfer and recognition of meaning and truth, filled with emotion, connection, history, context, complexity and humanity.
When I was in the library, I experienced all of this at once. As humans, we live to hear and tell stories. What encapsulates communication are our own stories, in connection to others and life itself. This is what I realized in my time at Wroxton. And this is what I want to devote my life to, the connection and telling of stories, mine and others to come.