Thursday, August 1, 2013

Already, always listening



This was something I should have written a long time back, but just a few minutes back, a friend was trying to have a restrained conversation with me assuming certain reactions from me, which may or may not be true. We all have that, don't we. I also did have that.

It is called already, always listening. I learned this word from Landmark forum in 2008, where I got THE breakthrough of my life, leading me to become a much lesser mauldin.

In my life, already, always listening happened this way. From childhood, having brought up in a tougher circumstance, living with two control freaking men in my life (bro and dad) crunched in a 400 square feet apartment in Mumbai, and I wondered, what a life! And then there was this thought about them I carried all along to a teenager and later. I was always in the mode of 'already always listening'. For most part of it, when I shifted the control button to myself, I was already thinking, no use telling them anything, they will always be like this and I am wasting my time trying to convince my passion or dreams.

For every time, before even I could approach them, I had a preset mind, this is how they will respond. So my mind is mentally deciding the answer, so where is the room for openness for allowing my mind without pre-conditioning it?

I realised this in forum. I decided to change the way I look at people and how they would react or behave. Rather, I just stopped anticipating responses in the way I think I usually would have.

Most of us live like that, and most contradictions, fights happen because we are already, always listening. Most of us refuse to look behind the layers of an individual, in a different perspective and only look at things we want to capture and then we tag them like, he is like this or she is like this. How much of a space or room, do we really give to people to let them be someone else and not what you think they are.
Most of the communication problems arise from this, from already always listening.

We create these rackets, borrowing my word from Forum. We refuse to create choice in a harmonic way and judge people in a pattern. When we allow ourselves to openly embrace someone without inhibitions, there are lesser frictions, lesser issues and the relation becomes strong and binding.
I remember after the forum, how my mind towards my brother and father changed, how we rebonded with a new way of looking at each other, as not how we used to in the past. It changed the world for me.

Already, always listening is a barrier. Break it.