I talk a lot (part 1)

I have heard this thing time and again, people come over to me and tell me "you speak a lot" and this comes in various ways, sometimes manifested in their body language, through the movement of the eyes trying to look away and to find an escape, through the fidgeting hands and legs which seem capable of moving but have been obstructed in some ways, through the changing contours on the faces of people which keep on hovering between the spring and the fall. I have heard this as a complaint, as a compliment (yes speaking more can be compliment too sometimes of your liveliness), as an excuse to divert the issue, as a way to tell you that its time to shut up, as an authoritative gesture to assert one's self, to quiten some one, at times to impose tranquility in absurd situations which demand silence more than words since the words themselves are futile (in these moments it is the situation which speaks rather than the person). It sometimes comes in the garb of a culture, sometimes as history and also one can not leave out psychoanalysis and then politics. In discourse it also means that one has to provide spaces for other people to make their points to present their opinions and also to listen to them.

Listening is an important art which needs to be cultivated and it comes with tolerance and with acceptance of the other, but strangely the allegation or more say prescriptions of me being loqacious still abound even when I think I have been able to develop this art of listening to a great extent. I would like to keep a finger of skepticism on me too but I think the idea of writing this in itself means that I wish to understanding this phenomenon through understanding conversation i.e. listening and speaking.

What can be the reasons for this? I would foreclose any psychoanalysis at this point since I have not been able to understand this phenomenon either through understanding of my conscious or unconscious patterns or through a history of my childhood. There might be something hidden there but I dont know if that does play an important role since our self is always in the process of formation and to pin point its determination from some events in history only would be a bit of a mistake. But still I would like to leave some leads if some body really wish to explore it from that dimension or if and when I myself find more reasons to do so. This event has to do with my stammering when I was a child, it was quite difficult to utter words and ages would pass when a sentence would be constructed. This stage remained I think till when I was five or something, infact there is an instance which is linked to this too. I think I was 4 or 5 I dont remember exactly, that was the time when new buildings were being constructed around my residence. There used to be big trenches and tanks which were dug up to store water for the construction. This used to be a playing field for us young children and we used to go their with our paper boats to float around. It was one of these days that I and my friend Pankaj were floating paper boats providing it sails to different directions, it was he who made boats and I joined in the fun since I never knew how to make them and even still dont know. But I used to be active in floating it and during one of these plays one of the boats actually went quite far away from our small hands and Pankaj tried to catch it and bring it back, he outstretched a bit far to actually fall in the tank which was deep. I did not know what to do, I could not catch hold of him and get him out so I went running to call my neighbour didi who was there, but it took pains to me to explain what had happened. But still we could manage to get him out. I still remember that event but I dont know still if it affected my speech, though we managed to save him and I got my sweets in reward but still the stammer after years remains. It precedes my speech and my beginning to the point that I can not override a person when that person is talking or intervene in between since it takes time to start and thus I have to patiently wait for my turn to speak but when I speak I also acknowledge that I talk a lot. How much it has to do with that instance I cant say but I would only take it as one reason of many reasons.