Clutter can be distracting. Often when we listen to people or engage with people who are experiencing pain we don’t make enough space in our own psyches to hear a person. Not only that when we do hear them we come at them with quick fixes our own solutions or even opinions of what might be the next best move. All of the above is more like providing a brain storming session for someone who literally doesn’t know how they feel, never mind what they want. Here we are supposedly helpful individuals bombarding someone with an idea whether it is welcome or not. This strategy can be very well meaning. However it doesn’t address the challenge at hand and at worse can deny the emotions of the very person you are trying to help. The way we listen to people and even to ourselves can often be very damaging.
Often it can be very hard to understand exactly what someone is saying. We all have such nuanced and complex emotional landscapes we mistake what we might feel for what someone else feels. When in fact they are very different. That two people can go through exactly the same experience, hold different perspective of exactly what happened and extract totally different meanings or interpretations of what it meant for them. There is so much to learn. There is almost no doubt that other humans are our greatest teachers. Yet we still superimpose our own beliefs and ideas on the person in front of us. Doing this undermines our own learning process and ability to grow. Well all have so many stories and experiences. Out lives the family environments that we grow up in are all totally unique and can never be replicated. If we treated each human as an artistic masterpiece, our lives would be so enriched. We would dive into one another with total abandon and we would never seek to “improve”, alter or change any part of the other. We would be engrossed in the process of learning all we can in that very moment. Time is short our moments together are precious.
So if we took the time to view the people in our lives in such ways. How would we change ourselves to accommodate this idea? How would we alter our interactions? The way we hear or understand another human. Would we be able to truly leave judgement at the door and open ourselves up the the power of each moment? Casting away our thoughts, the mental clutter and our predetermined ideas of acceptance. It’s a powerful idea that has delighted me this morning.