All of us at one point or the other have
been confronted with this situation: When there is a huge elephant in the room
but nobody wants to talk about it. I’m talking about those awkward moments when
you either are with a group of people or just one other person, there is
something weighing heavily on all your minds, which for some reason you just
cannot talk about. This ‘elephant’ wont fade to the back of your head, it will
block all your other thought processes and make conversation difficult, because
it’s hard to think of anything else to talk about.
The elephant might be something you are
extremely curious about, but the person/people in question are just not open to
discuss it and you know it. What’s worse, they know that you want to know. Or
it might be the other way around. It might be something that pertains to you
that you prefer not to discuss but the look on the other person’s face makes
you remember it every few minutes. There’s yet another one when together as a
group you get caught up in something very embarrassing which nobody wants to
talk about after, but nobody can think of anything else to say. I like to call
them ‘my elephant’, ‘your elephant’ and ‘our elephant’ respectively.
I don’t know if it’s just me, or in general
the older you get, or the more people you meet, you only have more and more
elephants in life to deal with! On my part if the elephant is ‘mine’ or ‘ours’,
I break the ice and talk about it. I find that it saves me a lot of energy
wasted being awkward. But if the elephant is someone else’s there’s nothing I
can do about it, is there?
One example I can think of is a
conversation with a not-so-close-but-more-than-just-an-acquaintance friend
who’d broken up from a very serious relationship. Well I know the person had
broken up, heck the noise made the whole world know, but when you talk to them
it’s like nothing happened! I’m not saying tell me all the gory details, all I
say is- when you once publicly displayed your affection for each other with me
among the uncomfortable spectators it’s just kind, to let
me know that, ‘Oh by the way we broke up’. That’s all I ask! Please do not
leave that big red with yellow polka dotted elephant hanging in the air.
Well, until the whole world shares my
opinion on addressing elephants, I just have to find a lot of conversation
topics! Here’s one thing that doesn’t work: Running away to a different
continent. Nope, the multi-coloured elephants will follow you.
