Some people believe that man's greatest power comes from his ability to speak. While I think part of this is true, I don't think that power comes from your ability to open your mouth and talk. It's easier to talk for most people and I guess that's rooted to human nature: people are selfish. We want other people to know about our ideas, we want other people to listen to what we have to say and we want people to act based off our intentions. How exactly do we get about with these ideas and longings? Some people think there's no greater side, listening or talking, it's all just a circle anyways. Even if it's true, that it is just a cause and effect within itself, I still think that something came first. One before the other, and just when people think I would agree to speaking being the dominant one among both, I think strength comes from one's ability to listen, to observe and reflect.
It's not easy. Most times we just want to tell our stories and we want our sides to be heard all the time. How exactly do people learn to talk in the first place? It's not by talking, definitely. Some would disagree and others would think the idea is stupid, because how exactly can one start learning how to talk if he doesn't start opening his mouth? It's easy actually. We learn to talk by listening. We learn how to really speak by taking in words from other people. Sentences. Phrases.Stories. What exactly is my point for all this? I guess I just want to share how beautiful it is to have travelled to so many places, experiences, emotions and time - through people. Have you ever sat down with someone on a plane? In a bus somewhere or on a boat that's headed off to another island? Have you listened to other people's stories? Have you gone out of your way to push aside the fatigue you feel from a 16-hour flight to avoid absentmindedly listening to someone who's talking about his love life, or family affairs, or how he feels about his job? Not everyone will be good with conversation, and sometimes people will run their stories in a circle, but what exactly have you lost? Time, opportunity, a new experience? Time - When we think about it, no matter what we do we're always losing time, anyways. When we drink a glass of water we lose time to eat our food 5-15 seconds faster, when we fiddle with our keys and lock our doors we lose time to go down the building 10-20 seconds earlier. Opportunity - I guess economics would be put to good use here. If you haven't learned about opportunity costs, I think we're having that everyday of our lives. Every choice and decision we make and everything that we decide to do, we lose an opportunity to do something else. Like how choosing to play basketball costs us an extra hour or two for studying and like how eating with your friends cost you movie night with your family. No matter what we do some other opportunity will be affected. When you say yes to one thing, you say no to a million other things. Experience - Please refer to the paragraph about opportunity. And what exactly do we gain from listening to other people? To their stories, their problems, their sadness and their joys? We gain exactly what they give us. We gain stories, we gain their problems, we gain their sadness and joys and we gain their trust, even if it's just a moment in time and even if it's just in an airport somewhere waiting for your delayed flight or an hour's ride in a bus... We gain an experience we will NEVER be able to get from our specific and detailed wants in this life. And that includes the stories that we want and choose to hear. We're too selfish for our own good. We're too picky and choosy and we choose which stories are good or not or which people to listen to or not. If you take the time and appreciate the guts of someone who talks to you about what you could possibly judge as the most unimportant or most boring problem in the world, you'll see the world and people in a very different light. Again, it's selfish when we judge these stories because we have a basis for what is interesting, or we compare them to what we're experiencing right now... Everything comes back to us. People forget or they fail to realise that when you listen, it's not about you anymore, it's about other people. There will be no comparisons and there will be no scale to what they say because their stories are not yours to begin with. Your life is different from theirs just as how yours is different to many. And even though we know our differences we want to share something in common, knowledge of someone's life. A part of someone that could never be paid for or bought. That's why when people choose to share their experiences or stories, I never turn away because I get to have something priceless for a moment in my life.
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