A road, path, or highway affording passage from one place to another.

Way.

Just three little letters, one breath. But the gulf between said or written and heard or read is always there. That, we know instinctively, or are told in college by people with French names, but the point is the same. There's a slippage, even with words like way, that we can’t do anything about. Which way do you know, will you make?

So much a sign on a church and a moving van have in common, so much they don't. In two days, I noticed “way” twice. And stopped. Seeing both together, I wonder more what each meant. Both somehow more beautiful, even as they’re less clear.

Lots of thinking about negotiation and communication lately, and even though I didn't take the GMATs, I find I have a willing study partner these days. Families, governments, friends, religions, international oil conglomerates, art museums. They all think they get each other, even as they so often fail to. It's simple, but two minutes of the day's news or walking down the street offer a dozen reminders -- the ability of language to get at just at how we are thinking and feeling and communicating with one another is matched only by how far and how often it can fall wide.

Strange to be talking about the story of the Tower of Babel recently, and be reminded that maybe this inability to communicate is nothing new, that people are stuck with this gap between one another. That in life, as in shopping, this gap often sucks.

But, then, watch how sometimes you can finish a person's sentence, synapses seemingly fire at once, and feel that gap close a bit. It’s almost imperceptible, but it closes, nonetheless. And it’s a comfort.

As it turns out, there are lots of ways.