We talk constantly. We speak to our spouses when we wake up, to our children when we try to get them up, to our friends on the way to work, to the person preparing our morning bagel, and on and on. Most of that speech is automatic.

“Hey, how are you doing?”
“Great, you?”
“Can’t complain. I mean, I could complain but who’d listen?”

When we’re not talking, we often hear an internal dialogue.

“Why didn’t you demand a raise?”
“Next time, next time.”
“You’re always saying that. This is next time.”
“Hey, stop yelling at me!”

Words are as natural most of the time as the steps we take on the way to or from the car, down the block, or up the stairs. We don’t think, “Left, right, left, right.” Wait, no, isn’t it, “Right, left, left, right, right?”

And yet, something happens to the natural flow of words when we have to give a speech. It’s not the same for everyone. I suspect many politicians are so comfortable giving speeches that they just need to know where the camera is to share their eloquence.

That’s not exactly the word I’d use to describe the times I’ve had to speak in front of large, or even medium-sized groups. I’ve spoken out in meetings many times about stories, offering my opinion or awareness of the history of an evolving story to a group of editors.

I’m fine in those situations. It’s when I get up in front of a group of people, many of whom I don’t know, to share some words on a subject that the discomfort begins.

I lick my lips regularly before I begin, as the saliva that pours forth from my mouth so readily at other times has decided that this moment is the ideal time to take a vacation.

My breathing becomes shallow and quick. “I, uh, would, uh, like to, uh, say a few words.”

Speeches are like walking on the bottom of the ocean, wearing heavy boots and breathing through a small tube. Suddenly, the words become like unknown and unseen obstacles, blocking the path to communicating something charming, witty, insightful and cohesive.

“Uh, hi, I’m, uh, uh, Dan, right, Dan.”

Why do those public words become so unfamiliar and uncomfortable? Is it because we can’t correct them? Do we feel as if we need to perform the words instead of just sharing what’s percolating in our minds at the time?

In the middle of a speech, we can’t say, “Where was I? Oh, yes, that’s it. I could really use a tuna sandwich right now.”

I recently gave a short speech in front of a group celebrating my brother’s birthday. I didn’t know many of the people in the room and even though it was a receptive audience, I started to feel the typical nerves building up in those last few moments.

The speech went fine, or so people have assured me. But then, of course, the voices in my head shared their customary public-speech criticism.

I became like all those pundits who second guess every word and decision after an election or after the big game. “You know,” I thought to myself, “you should have started with this joke. That would have been funnier.”

“Oh yeah?” I wanted to bark back at that self-critical voice. “Where were you 10 minutes ago?”

“I was here, you just couldn’t hear me because too many other voices were up here, shouting into your ear not to mess up.”

Yet it always seems to turn out all right. Until the next time.

We go so far even when we don’t seem to go anywhere. Our daughter’s jazz band played the same repertoire for the last few months, with the same solos, the same black pants for most of the group and the same introduction to the numbers from an incredibly positive and energetic conductor.

The first time they played compositions such as “Take the ‘A’ Train,” written by Billy Strayhorn and made famous by Duke Ellington, they sounded as if they were trying on clothing that didn’t exactly fit. They had their moments when they played together and some of the solos filled the room with the kind of spontaneous, live performance sounds you can’t soak in even with the finest video recording devices.

The group also had a few unsteady and discordant sounds. The problem with playing arrangements people in the audience know is that they recognize when the note isn’t exactly right, and they react when the entrance is too early or too late in a transitional phrase.

The audience wanted to let the music wash over them the first time they heard it, but they were like passengers on an airplane that ran into turbulence. They smiled through it, willing their sons and daughters to cleaner phrases, better sounds and a uniform performance.

A few weeks later, the group played the same music again and, ever so slightly, they improved. One of the players seemed to own the first few measures of her solo, turning several heads toward the stage as she directed her sound squarely into a microphone.

At the end of that performance, the applause seemed bigger — and so did the musicians.

Time after time, this group came together, working its way from guessing at notes to hitting them with the same energy as a “Jeopardy!” contestant who can barely wait to win money.

Recently, the jazz band had its final concert. Most of the players, who had performed together for close to two years, would be disbanding as they went off to high school. Yes, they will likely play some music again together, but the combination of two middle schools meant this was the last time these people would share music with their parents, families and community members.

Something about this final night felt different, even as they sauntered to their seats. Gone were the unsteady footsteps and the anxious looks.

The conductor, whose smile hadn’t changed from the first performance, snapped his fingers to the jazz rhythms — in contrast to classical music, where a baton is used. The group nailed that final concert, with each solo better than the one before and each chord coming together the way the composer intended. Could it have been better? Sure, and it will be better in high school and beyond. On this night, though, when the musicians put their instruments back in their cases and prepared to walk their individual paths, they shared everything they had on the stage with their appreciative audience.

The conductor took a moment, toward the end of the performance, to thank the musicians and the audience for sharing the three years of middle school with him. He commented on the changes he’d seen in them as people and as musicians, watching them enter when they were 11 from primary school and exit to high school as 13- and 14-year-olds.

As these young students consider the uncertainty of high school, with moments when school, music, sports and friends suddenly seem filled with awkward tension, they can reflect on the musical journey they’d taken and the music they conquered together.

A boys’ baseball team I coached recently lost a game in such an excruciating fashion that I couldn’t rely on all the standby coach catchphrases.

“We’ll get ’em next time,” would fall flat, especially when we had them for the taking. We were up by two runs and were in complete control of the game until the final outs.

“Hey, this one’s on me.” That’s nice and can work in deflecting any possible blame, but the kids generally don’t buy into it. If they believe it, it also sets a dangerous precedent for future losses.

“Hey, coach,” they might ask at the end of another game. “This one’s clearly not on you, right? Isn’t it Johnny’s fault?”

Those final three outs never happened. What made the game even more difficult to swallow was that the other team didn’t put a single ball in play in their final at bat. Four walks, a hit batter and a few wild pitches later, we were done.

We trudged to left field for the postgame analysis and pep talk.

“Hey,” I said. “Look, uh, this is one game, right?”

I could see it in their eyes: “Weak and feeble, coach. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

“You know, we did a lot right this game.”

“Who cares,” their sullen, downcast eyes indicated.

“We lost.”

“OK, well, we can’t win them all.”

I didn’t even need to look at them to know what they were thinking. I was thinking it, too, as the words came dribbling out of my mouth. “Seriously? You’re going with that?”

“Boys, I know you all did your best.”

Their eyes moved to their parents, as if they were saying telepathically: “Get me out of here, I want to go home.”

“Hey,” I said, a small smirk on my face. “Guys, who saw Joey’s slide at second today? Was that the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen?”

Joey had wandered too far from second and would have been out if the pitcher had thrown the ball to the second baseman. When the second baseman had to move a few feet from the base, Joey dove back head first and landed flat on his chest, a yard short of the base. He crawled on his hands and knees across the dirt to the base, arriving just in time to beat the second baseman’s tag.

“That was funny,” several of them seemed to say. Joey, you see, is a bit sensitive so that comment could have been dangerous. Even he, however, offered a small smile. It was an absurd moment to savor. And, fortunately for us, he was safe, so laughing about it was probably safe.

In that final, fateful, painful inning, the first pitcher walked two and hit a batter, sending the tying run to second and the winning run to first. I brought in a tall relief pitcher who promptly walked another two batters. A wild pitch later, the game was over.

“Fred, do you know why I put you in there at the end of the game?” I asked.

“Because you believed in me?” he offered hopefully.

“Well, sure, but the real reason is that you’re much taller than me.”

Again, I was reaching for the absurd. No one looked at their parents.

“Yeah, you see, it’s not right for a 12-year-old boy to be taller than his coach. I needed to cut you down to size.”

The grin spread quickly across his face, as well as those of the other four boys who look down on me.

No, it wasn’t in the playbook, but it worked.

Where do we get the “Oh, right, I get it,” moments? We’re so close to ourselves and our lives that those moments are often hard to see. It’s like in the movies, where someone has a close friend: Lo and behold, that friend turns into something much more, once personal introspection is abandoned and it is realized how important such a friendship is deep down.

Beyond the romantic comedies, however, we can turn to dramas, action films or other forms of entertainment for a broader awareness of ourselves and our lives.

Let’s say we’re driving on the Long Island Expressway and somebody cuts us off. What do we do? Well, if we’ve got kids in the car, we might grind our teeth, hold on tight to the steering wheel and fight the urge to say things that would look something like “$#$#@%$!!!” in a cartoon.

But what did that person make us do? Did we have to hit the brake a bit when we’re on the way to a soccer game? Did she interrupt our train of thought when we were about to cure cancer, come up with a solution for tension in the Middle East, or figure out a way to reduce fossil fuel emissions from the thousands of planes that soar overhead?

Is it possible that she was racing home from work to take care of a kid with a stuffy nose, to hear someone’s first violin concert or congratulate her son for earning his first A in social studies?

Yes, most of the time we’re, thankfully, stuck in the world of the small stuff. If we’re fortunate enough, we’re not worried every moment about taking care of basic needs. I know people have told us many times not to sweat the small stuff and they’ve even urged us to understand that it’s all small stuff. The problem is that we’ve become accustomed to a world in which everything is available to us right now and in which we don’t want to wait for anything or anyone.

How’s all that extra time working out for us? Are we all enjoying the chance to spend more quality time with each other? We seem to have freed up our time so that we can disconnect with the people around us, staying plugged in to a virtual world devoid of awkward silences, driven by words that pour out of our fingers instead of our mouths. We don’t have to comb our hair or check our teeth to send someone a funny text with a little premade goofy face.

This isn’t a diatribe against electronics. I enjoy the instant gratification of knowing something that comes from ubiquitous Internet access.

In movies like “American Beauty,” we see Kevin Spacey “get it” a bit too late. He doesn’t see the wonder of his life, his wife and his daughter until he can’t appreciate or show it.

In real life, even people with jobs they dreamt about often get so caught up in what they’re doing that they seem to miss “it.” Of course, when these small, unflattering moments occur for our fame-generated celebrities, eager members of the paparazzi capture them “losing it.”

It’d be difficult to smell the flowers, become energized and inspired by a child’s question, or pause to appreciate a shifting wind all the time. We wouldn’t get much done and, I suspect, might miss a bill, deadline, meeting or two.

But, wouldn’t it be nice if those “Oh, right, I get it,” moments came more often, giving us the ability to appreciate the unseen air we breathe and the world of infinite possibilities that awaits around the corner?

Bruce Stillman is still very determined even if he sounds frustrated. I interviewed the CEO of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory last week when the research institution released, for the first time, a set of numbers indicating the positive economic impact of CSHL on Long Island.

While proud of an institution that has produced eight Nobel Prize winners, Stillman sounded a theme I hear regularly when I interview scientists at CSHL, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University: The country isn’t investing enough in research.

“The reduction in federal funding means we do have to support the institution through philanthropy more than we’ve been doing in the past,” Stillman said. “Hopefully, Congress will realize they should reverse the dramatic reduction in funding in the federal budgets. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Indeed, investments in research around the country make sense on many levels. For starters, many of us have unfortunate direct experience with a deadly disease like cancer, which slowly tears through a person’s body. We have also witnessed friends who have demonstrated spectacular courage and determination in the face of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases.

Inspired by our friends and neighbors, we walk, run or do triathlons and we spend time in church, synagogues and mosques praying for them and for strangers battling the same affliction.

Scientists aren’t just looking for ways to lessen the symptoms or ease the pain — they’re also working to find signs of the disease before they appear. Angelina Jolie raised awareness of the potential benefits of preventing problems when she elected to have several surgeries.

As their doctors would rush to tell them, people shouldn’t have surgeries just because a famous actress did. Places like CSHL can provide the kind of knowledge that provides information that empowers informed decisions.

“There’s a lot of misinformation on the Internet,” Stillman said. “What the scientific community is trying to do is to make sure the information about genomics and medicine is correct and [people aren’t relying on information] out there that is misleading.”

Beyond the applied science part, however, researchers who are doing basic science often wind up making critical discoveries. By only funding those projects that might have a direct impact on human health, can and will be too self-limiting. What we learn can and often does help us. On the other side of that scale, what we don’t know can’t have any impact.

And then there’s the financial benefit. Research often has a multiplier effect, creating jobs, bringing in revenue and supporting the local economy.

“Everybody knows, including politicians, that science is an economic driver,” Stillman said. “If you take away public research funding, you’re basically giving up.”

Stillman said that what’s gone on in the last 15 years in the United States “bucks the trend since World War II, when the U.S. was invested and was a world leader in research.”

Stillman himself, who was born in Australia, has won numerous awards and runs his own DNA lab, said he came to this country because of American leadership in research, but now “things are changing rapidly. People like me will not come to this country because there’ll be opportunities elsewhere.”

CSHL, BNL, Stony Brook and LIJ are all huge economic benefits for Long Island, Stillman said.

“Unless this gets reversed,” he warned, “we’ll be in trouble.”

So, what will turn the tide?

“There’ll come a time when one can’t ignore the government role in economic development,” he said. It’s happened before, he argues, as investments in research after World War II helped bring the U.S. out of debt.

As a result future generations benefited enormously — and will do so again.

A friend recently forwarded an amusing Time Out article that included a list of things you’d never hear a parent say in New York City. I’d like to offer a suburban version, with the qualifying caveat that these are probably things you’d rarely hear a suburban parent say:

“Searching for a parking spot when three of my kids are late for their activities is so much fun. I’m sure one will open up soon and it’ll be incredibly close to where we need to go.”

“Awesome, the price of gas went up again. How about that? That’ll give us a chance to practice our math skills, guessing at the percentage increase in the cost of filling our tank.”

“An away game? Great. That gives us so much quality time to play a real-life version of an arcade game from our generation: Frogger.”

“You told your six friends we’d be driving? Fantastic, but you know our car only fits four, right?”

“Oh, hey, that’s a great idea. I’ll drive and you completely ignore me with a huge grin on your face while you type into your electronics. I thoroughly enjoy talking to myself.”

“You need one purple sock, one red sock and a Dr. Seuss hat in the next 20 minutes? Sure, no problem.”

“Why would my child need to sign up for another activity?”

“You hear that? Ah, yes, the leaf blower and the car alarm. Early morning music for the whole family.”

“Of course we can go to the new frozen yogurt place for breakfast.”

“Hey, I understand. Your son needed to practice his hitting outside at 6 a.m. because he has a big game. Well, good luck to him.”

“I’m sure we can find an art store that’s open at 11 p.m. tonight for a project that’s due tomorrow.”

“I don’t know how they do it. But every year they seem to put together exactly the right combination of kids for each class.”

“The teachers are just getting better and better. I’m sure all the tutors in this town are going to struggle to find students who need any extra help.”

“They have it so much harder than we did when we were young, poor dears.”

“Why, yes, I think we should change everything we do so that we can live like the Jones family. That’s a great idea, staying up until 2 a.m. on Monday nights. I’m not sure why we didn’t think of that sooner.”

“The older generation looks so much better in selfies than the younger one.”

“Fantastic, you’ve signed up for a team with all the same players for another season. That means the same parents will all get to hang out together and watch the same set of neuroses unfold during each quarter of the game.”

“They’ve added more standardized testing? What an incredible opportunity to learn and grow. You’re going to be so much further ahead than children in Japan, who are wasting their time with new material every day.”

“I’d love to answer your question, honey, but I’m not sure if there’s anywhere around here that I can get coffee first.”

“I’m sure there’s a great restaurant open close by at 11 p.m. on a Monday night that’ll be thrilled to have our team of 25 celebrate the end of another great season.”

“Oh, great, here comes Sheila, whose kids are so much better than mine, yours and those of everyone else. I can’t wait to hear about all the awards her kids have won this week.”

“So glad we were able to provide such a complete meal for the raccoons last night.”

“Absolutely. Everything is just perfect in the suburbs.”

When you’re meeting deadlines every week, dealing with angry clients, when traffic takes forever for an important meeting or when body parts that all worked together for all those years now seem to be pulling in opposite directions, it’s easy to let the whole notion of romance slip.

Sure, we have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays and Valentine’s Day — well, you have Valentine’s Day.

I’m not a big fan of mass, romantic gestures on cue that support the card and flower industries, when we can make our boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands or wives feel special. But, much of the time, especially when we’ve got kids who have mastered the art of playing on our last nerve with the kinds of conversations that are soaked in sarcasm and disrespect, we might find it a tad challenging to find the time, energy and resources to raise the level of our romantic game.

And yet, one day our children, who just yesterday seemed to have absolutely no use for the opposite sex, have made that remarkable transition from whispering to each other about who they like to mustering the courage to speak to that person.

Recently, our daughter and her friends have been pulled into the whirlwind of an eighth-grade formal.

The communication network is extraordinarily efficient and reliable. Everyone, it seems, knows who is asking everyone else. It’s too bad they can’t add some algebra to the messages they’re all delivering to each other or, perhaps, a few Latin phrases that might be on an AP exam.

As an aside, it’s too bad meteorologists, who still seem to be living with egg on their faces from the big blizzard miss of 2015, can’t develop a forecasting model with the same level of middle school accuracy.

These kids seem to have taken a page from the birds on suburban streets, who sing loudly through the day, calling to their would-be partners to come share some quality time in their cheery, oak, maple and dogwood trees. One boy interrupted everyone’s lunch in the cafeteria, took a microphone and asked a girl to the formal.

Another suitor, who wanted to go to the dance with a softball player, took softballs and wrote one letter on each ball, to spell out “formal”?

And, speaking of sporting equipment, another courageous boy filled a girl’s locker with ping pong balls, which spilled out on the floor when she opened it. In the back of her locker, he’d put a note saying he finally found enough, uh, balls to ask her to the dance. She said “yes.”

There have been a few broken hearts and a few near misses, with a girl saying “yes” to someone just as another boy approached her with flowers. Those flowers suffered an unfortunate fate in the hands of the tardy suitor.

Learning that a boy she didn’t want to accompany to the dance planned to ask her at an after-school activity, another girl changed her plans and was suddenly missing in action.

Fortunately, it seems that, on balance, the anxiety level and frustration is considerably lower than the amusement these classmates have for this process.

As the boys are finding increasingly clever ways to ask the girls to the dance, I can’t help wondering if adult women and men find a similar satisfaction with a good romantic comedy or chick flick once in a while. The sound of those birds singing outside our homes may be just as recognizable and pleasant as a part of the courtship dance to men as they are to women — or indeed to the growing children.