When you meet your friend on the roadside or in the market place, let the spirit in you move your lips and direct your tongue.
Let the voice within your voice speak to the ear of his ear;
For his soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered
When the colour is forgotten and the vessel is no more.
-Khalil Gibran
Ahem...are you feeling solemn already? But wait! Reading philosophical poetry doesn't steal from us the pleasure and right of blabbing solemnly! So, here goes...sense or new sense you decide!
A friend of mine once went to work in a city where she didn't rather couldn't pick up the local language at all. Not one bit. So, in public transports her ears were automatically set to 'Noise' mode. She didn't register much. After a few months when she was home on a vacation, she recollected a funny thing. It took a good couple of seconds for her ears to register that she could now understand the chatter around!
As funny as it sounds, this is practised even in normal circumstances that are in no way similar to what my friend had experienced.
People choose to listen or choose not to, just like they choose to speak or they don't.
Even when they can.
Now see, that's not similar to any other thing we do. Eating, smelling, seeing,feeling, sleeping even dreaming is not always fully driven by our choice. Which means out of all these things that we can 'do', talking can be most tastefully faked! You can never judge if a person is really eating or faking it. The intake ultimately reaches his stomach.
Even when a person tries to fake a feeling, he ends up feeling something else. Maybe disgust, maybe disinterest. Nonetheless, there's never an absence of a feeling.
Added to the already existing confusion, the cherry on the cake is that the society deduces a person by how they talk. One is allocated in one or many of the various groups of class, knowledge, personality, strength, capability by the way one speaks, by the content one chooses to spill out of one's mouth. Not necessarily from the heart.
On the other side of the coin, strangely though, you'd find that the most amusing conversations are possibly made with people who barely open their mouth! And a chatterbox might have a dearth of amusing or worthwhile things to say constantly and consistently. Quite a pressure.
As a thoroughly frustrated and vexed soul once complained about the spouse and telecom vendors citing the unwelcome pressures in life, for how can one have increased content in conversations with increasing 'free talk minutes' on your mobile phone!
Well, why do we talk? Maybe the right question is, why do we want to listen or pretend to listen! Maybe it's like waves, waves of words, hitting our eardrums and the shores of our understanding at the same time. Or maybe not.
The waves won't hit the shores if they aren't called to the shores. Meaning, one listens only what one waits to listen. And when the waves are not called, it's indeed just winds that hit the shores. Meaning, one gets to hear constant blab when one doesn't particularly want to listen to anything.
I wonder, if that's what the original origin of the word 'windbag' is!
Are you feeling kinda clueless at this juncture of the post?Whoa! Wait a second..are you trying to reach a possible conclusion after all this talk?
Sorry pal, 'twas a monologue! I was just thinking loud..very very loud...listening to myself on the shores of my understanding!
In case your head is now beeping alarmingly, "what nonsense!!", there's a possible remedy. Well, if you want to, you can always stroll on the shores for a bit while I talk to myself! What say?
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Well, speak up, am still listening :-)
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