God Is in the Spaces between People

I didn't even like this movie that much, but I'm hoping it might provide a modicum of context for what is on my brain right now. This does, of course, only even have the chance of working if you've actually seen the movie, but hey.

These two people get on my nerves a little. They're conceited and cynical in the most infuriatingly cheerful way. They're quietly very smug about their half-baked intellectualist ideas of the ways in which the world revolves around them. They irritate me probably quite substantially less than the impression I'm giving here, but what I'm trying to say was that it wasn't the personalities or themes that got to me in this movie. Something got to me quite plainly in spite of them.

It's the way this film seems to define communication. When these two talk, it's not as if they even listen to each other particularly - they just seem to generally inhabit the same thematic universe inside of the same conversation. This leads me to induce that what constitutes true communication, is you going on and the other person actively encouraging you. He doesn't even have to take it in - he just needs to genuinely enjoy being a part of the interaction, and hear you out with something more than politeness.

I know that politeness doesn't cut it because I'm uber-polite, and over the past few years I have had ample occasion to observe that this is generally not enough. Even when I was actually actively listening to people, out of some weird misplaced sense of duty, when the subjects they were talking about did not excite me on a fundamental level, despite my alert attention, their own excitement and the conversation would fizzle out.

Another thing that annoyed me about these characters was their constant insistence on the transitoriness and ethereality of this night, when it seemed quite clear to me that all it was was chemistry between two human beings, which along with being awesome has the convenient advantage of being incredibly earthy and recreatable.

So, taking that into consideration, it puzzles me that I almost never try to communicate with people. I might not have the same level of chemistry with someone in my life as these two characters have, but I certainly share enough "themes" with people to be easily capable of communicating about them. I just keep it to myself. I think this is something I've begun to do fairly lately and I don't really know why.

I doubt it's for a good reason, though. If I recognize that communication with other people is pretty much what makes life worth living, shouldn't it follow that I would try to attain this? Is there anything holding me back except cowardice?