Who are communication experts trying to fool when they say “first give compliments, and then, instead of using the word but, use and before revealing just what you have noticed that is not quite so complimentary”? Who is so daft they won’t detect this sleight-of-hand wordplay? However, there is a time when using and instead of but is absolutely the right thing to do.
Let’s say you want to go to the beach: it is your escape from all that nags you, inwardly, outwardly, hauntingly – your ever-present, ever-distant destination. Alas, you are here, the beach is there.
Picture yourself, then, in your back yard. No, wait, actually go to your back yard, or your front yard, or somewhere outside. Hopefully it is nice out, but it doesn’t have to be. You sit, quietly, meditatively, peacefully, feeling the hot sun, or the cool breeze, or the soft drizzle of rain.
Now, if I am sitting next to you (or somehow I have gotten into your mind), I happen to point out how the hot sun is not unlike the hot sun at the coast. Or, I hint that the breeze could be coming off the ocean, and its lengthy whoosh up in the trees’ leaves is not completely unlike the ocean from a couple of hundred yards away.
Well, your first reaction is “yes, but…it is not the ocean.” WRONG! You ought to say “yes, I feel it, AND it is the ocean!” The wind is the same wind; the sun, too, has the same warmth (or lack thereof), and the rain might just as well be the same rain that you endure because you have driven quite a ways to be beside the ocean. Good smells in the air – the same! The beach is with us always.
Here and there – yes! There but not here – no!
And this is a lesson in the interconnectedness of all things. Our senses receive qualia and we interpret it. Our mind can recognize it as interconnected and inclusive.
Here and there and everywhere. Vegetable and mineral and human and animal.
We all belong.