Chapter 5- Feng Shui

All I wanted when I innocently typed ‘feng shui’ into Google’s search engine was a nice, simple, clear-cut definition that would magically and perfectly segue into Wood’s discussion of environmental factors contributing to nonverbal communication. What I got was a confusing list of shady-looking websites telling me the best place in my room to orient my bed in order to invite romance into my life, which wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. It’s a good thing I found someone to fix my feng shui dilemma.

            “Environmental factors are elements of settings that affect how we feel and act. For instance, we respond to architecture, colors, room design, temperature, sounds, smells, and lighting” (Sternberg, 2009 as cited in Wood, 2012, p. 131). They can be indicators of varying power and social statuses in several different ways; fast food restaurants’ seating is often packed together, whereas formal restaurants are more generously spacious with their seating arrangements; prisons are noisy and lacking in privacy, but business executives have offices with doors that block out unwanted sound and incorporate privacy into the environment (Wood, 2012). How we set up our personal environments can speak volumes about how we’re communicating on a nonverbal level.

            Now, back to the feng shui. I hit a bit of a road bump when I moved into Selleck for the summer; usually I live in Neihardt, and the floor plans there are completely different. I had more furniture than I knew what to do with in a smaller, less-familiar room, and I spent my first few nights there constantly sliding the desks, dresser, and bunked bed frame (the facilities staff wouldn’t take out the extra bed, so I had to stack them) around to find an arrangement I liked. Nothing was clicking for me after several failed attempts, so I gave up. I put the bed frame against the wall with the window, and everything else on the sides of the room.

            It’s perfectly normal for me to mope around for awhile at the beginning of the summer. My friends all move away, I likely won’t be able to see them until the fall, and… that gets to me. When the moping didn’t wear off after three weeks or so like it has done every other year, I started questioning myself. Why wasn’t it going away? Extended daylight hours during the summer always cheered me up before, even if I missed my friends. I looked at my room setup one day and finally figured it out. Squaring my shoulders, I once again moved my furniture around. The desks and dresser were all along the same wall, my bed frame was along the other, and I then had a big, magnificent, wide-open window that allowed natural daylight to stream into the room. My mopiness vanished like a cat into a couch.

            In suggesting how to improve nonverbal communication, Wood asks us, “have you set up your spaces so that they invite the kind of interaction you prefer, or are they arranged to interfere with good communication?” (Woods, 2012, p. 135). Even though my residents and coworkers were all fairly new to me, they knew I was definitely feeling off-balance. I smiled, laughed, and interacted with them and was involved in classroom settings as well, but I was never all there. The very way I set up my room, which is a personal environment most people I communicate with on a daily basis don’t get to see, reached all the way into my world of nonverbal communication.

            Much like my newly-rearranged (again) room, my outlook literally brightened up and I was able to communicate much more genuinely with everyone I came across each day. Sometimes all you need to do is suck it up, break another sweat, and resign yourself to scraping some furniture around the room one more time. I can hear birds (as well as the indistinguishable roar of the touring NSE student and parent crowds as they wander around campus) whenever I open my window. I never liked feng shui anyway. :P

References

Wood, J. T. (2012). Interpersonal communication: Everyday encounters. (7 ed.). Boston, MA:      Wadsworth.