Same Same.

I wrote another letter to send out today but I decided against it. I’m not sure if it was because I wasn’t quite ready or I wasn’t happy with how I’d written it or I wasn’t sure whether I should talk about it at all. It was probably all three of those things - either way, I wasn’t comfortable with it so instead you have this one.

‘Why would you tell us that?’ I hear you ask. And while it may seem like an emotional thirst-trap, the reality is there are things I’m struggling with at the moment. It’s easy to assume that other people have got their shit together and I wanted you to know that I don’t have everything together. But, despite that, I’m good, life is good and therein lies the weirdness of life.

With that slightly existential start out of the way…there was something I heard that made me stop in my tracks: when we are listening, focus on the similarities and not the differences.

First of all, I had to go back to that word ‘listening’. I’m not great at it. It’s not my superpower. I’m very guilty of hearing people speak but being very focussed on what I want to say in response. I’ll wait, with an internal impatience, for my turn to speak. It’s not my most attractive quality sure, but I’m conscious of it and working hard to make space for other people in conversations.

I also wondered how many of us actually listen. I mean really listen. I've become conscious of this sneaky therapists trick - the one where they don’t reply when you’ve ‘finished’ speaking. Instead they wait. They give you the space to continue, to keep speaking, to go deeper and inevitably, that’s when the breakthroughs happen. (I believe police also do it in interrogations, giving perpetrators the space to give themselves away or confess.)

That space doesn’t seem to exist in everyday life amongst friends and it occurred to me that maybe it should. Maybe we should make more of an effort to actually listen and create space for those we love to speak.

Secondly, I love the idea that we can give the gift of listening to people that we may not necessarily fully identify with or agree with. Too often we focus on the negative within ourself, within others, within situations. But when it comes to people and their stories, there’s always something that we can identify with. Even if the events and the circumstances are different, the emotions are the same.

We all feel pain, joy, sadness, fear, worry, desperation - the whole range of human emotions. On that we can identify and yet we often choose to focus on the things we don’t identify with, the things that feel alien to us, the things that make us want to create distance.

So, yes, today - on this Tuesday - I’m going to listen and while I do, I’m going to focus on the similarities and not let the differences get in the way.

Have a fucking fantastic day.