Trickles

What trickles through the white noise when we listen hard?  I think that some of us, maybe me, maybe you, miss just about everything; the white noise packages any real insights from our social circle and we are left with somewhat base perceptions of ourselves and others.  In this - thegreatflashflood.blogspot.com - I talked about how to be friends, what it means and how it's accomplished.  But, in that, I left most on the nuances of attention out because I thought that anything could be said and disagreed with and recontextualized and dissolved and that this would form the acquaintances that matter to every one of us.

There's more to be said for listening through the bits and pieces of our friends lives and speeches so that we can understand, not what matters to us (you or I or anyone) but, what matters to them.  What matters to the friends in our social network, those in the same part of the ocean, and why should it matter to us individually unless what matters to them happens also to matter to us?  I'll tell you: because you (the other) matters.  And what this means is that we can't pull everything into ourselves and let those little bits of consciousness tell us what matters to another.  No, we have to go into another self to see what matters to that self.

Easy to remember if we say things like: "This is not all about me" over and over in our minds.  But really hard to make much progress with that.  (And in fact, most times I think we drop the first three words anyway).  And this is why we wonder about others in the context of ourselves, and why the most sensitive thing that we can do for another is think: "What can be done to help them?" and leave the I, you, me, out of the conversation.  

In third person reflection, we start to identify, not with our little selves, or the mere acquaintances in our network, but about the ocean itself.  [But this is not deep].  The way to do this, I think, is by being more expansive than anything and letting our work for others flow without the thought of what it does for/to us.  And this expansion requires the right kind of listening, otherwise we fall into habits and views of the good that will not readily take us to the point where we rise naturally to the surface of our situation by our own bouyancy and service to others.

We can do this (you, I, and everyone else) but most times we won't.  We won't; either because we have been lulled by the white crashing of our social world, or because we have failed to think it right to give up our minor preferences and explore those things which may only be preferences for others.  And thus, the noise that matters only remains as trickles in an ocean of noise (and that line was borrowed) and not the current that would move us to another spot in the ocean where we could be helpful in new ways.