Talking with Others

This isn't some deep insightful blog post about the secrets of learning. You can close out and try some other page for that. This is just a simple thought I had recently. For the longest time, I was asking questions without listening to the answers. I like what I have to say. I think I am relatively insightful and usually spend a lot of time just analyzing everything. One can take this to the extreme though. A person can disregard all the opinions that another person says because they fall outside of the realm of that person's logic. Or, one can do what I do, read too much into something.

I have never been that great in literature because I honestly don't see what the writer is trying to get across. (For all of my love of Eliot's J. Alfred Profrock, I cannot for the life of me understand it's meaning without a trained English scholar standing over my shoulder. Alfred Molina's character in Spiderman 2 remarks that, "Eliot is more complicated than advanced science.") I have probably been rooting around at the philosophical ramifications of someone's statement or perhaps I have been trying to move it towards areas I find more entertaining. They are just trying to have small talk. How does one perform this..."small talk"? The fact is I probably fail to let my friends be themselves.

I am a bit tired right now, and I hesitate to lump all people in this rather large net, but I think most of us are guilty of this. We wish to paint our friends as we would like to see them. We fail to really listen to them except when they have a problem we can solve and then we can play god.

I probably sound very dark and gloomy about all this, but I am really happy. There are great challenges in talking to friends and that should excite us with all its adventure. But we all have friends too. That is such a great thing, because it shows how we live in a very forgiving world that gives us quirky people who like our own quirkiness. Maybe that is my insight for tonight?