An Optical Illusion...

I am constantly listening to the people around me in hopes that their tales might have in some way a lesson from which I can learn something useful to apply in my own life. Every once in a while someone will reveal the tastiest recipe to not just a culinary delight, but also to the secret of being effective in a relationship. It is easy to become skeptical to certain individuals advice, but even the worst fisherman in the world is bound to catch a good size fish once in a while, and the same is true for my goal of seeking golden clues in strange and dark places. I think that the probability of being able to yell out "eureka" is heavily impacted by my persistent and constant panning for the elusive random nugget in other people's lives. What do I have to lose, right?

The tricks to finding something useful in life are many. If you fine tune your search skills the chances of success significantly increased. What is it that you need to do to become better at this? Well, to begin with you need to understand that patience truly is a virtue and not just a cliche. Effective listening skills are much more than just shutting up our mouths and opening our ears. You need to set yourself up with the proper frame of mind before you are able to learn from others. To start with, I learned that I need to wipe out prejudice from my mind to listen effectively. What an individual looks like or sounds like might seem relevant to what they are saying, but the truth is that it is usually not. I cannot tell you how many times I have started a conversation with someone that seems from the outside to be from an entirely different world than mine to later find out that in the inside we have an incredible affinity and much more in common than I could ever imagine. The more frequent this has happened in my life, the more I have learned to let go of my prejudice to people's gender, age, race, and more than anything their appearance. The common link between me and so many others around me is our need to survive. I don't mean survival in the sense of food, water, and sleep. I mean survival in the sense of our emotional need to find happiness. When I peel off all of the surrounding drama to almost any one's story, I find that beneath it all the most abundant theme is usually either happiness or the lack of it. This blog in itself is the perfect example of this reality. Behind every post the common theme that is prevalent and definite is my own need to be happy. Sure you will find funny, interesting, and useful plastered all over my words, but when you add them all together the underlying theme is my search for happiness.

For some of us the real challenge is not simply letting go of our prejudices in order to listen and learn from strangers, sometimes we are caught up in a complicated web of our own opinions. Every time someone starts to tell us what their experiences have taught them, we jump in too quickly to put our own two cents into the conversation. This is normal human social interaction, but a real killer in our search for further knowledge. Even though this blog might give you a different idea because of my openness and willingness to write so much about me and my life, I have slowly learned to try to be more of a listener than a talker. Even when I interject into an interesting conversation, many times what I offer on my end is a desire to know and learn more from the individual across from me. "What did you mean by...How do you deal with...Where did you learn to...???" All good questions to allow others to enlighten you with their life experiences. Sure, giving my opinion is also part of a good exchange, but not necessarily the best way for me to learn something new.

The most challenging skill that I have and still am learning is the ability to differentiate between reality and fiction. It is not so much that people might purposely be lying to me when they are sharing their lives, it is more about how they perceive their own reality. I am pretty sure that if you wanted to convince me that you are in control of many parts of your life that you might perceive to be in order, you actually could. However, upon closer inspection of your life I might later discover that what seemed to be in order is actually just an optical illusion created by personality traits such as positive attitude and a happy demeanor. Behind many people's illusion of control and order sometimes a great deal of chaotic efforts are working to keep and maintain the image that they desire to project outwards to the world. I have learned that the fact that many individuals wear these costumes of distorted reality is much more common than not. There are plenty of lessons I am able to learn by reading a fictional story or watching a movie. Learning from a fictional life is not always a waste of time, but still, learning from real life is much more useful. Even more important for me, I need to be able to recognize the difference so that I can be realistic with the value and effectiveness of what I might learn.

Yesterday, at the end of having watched "The Soloist," I felt a sense of sadness that seemed too overpowering for me to accept. The main character in the movie seemed so distant from the real world because of his mental illness that the story forced me to believe that his existence was limited in it's ability to be happy. As hard as the creators and actors tried to project the reality of this amazing man, there still seemed in my mind to be something missing. I went to the "Additional Material..." section on the DVD and then watched a short clip in which the real characters of the story interact with each other during an interview. My emotional impression changed 180 degrees from what I had been left with after watching the movie. In my opinion, the movie did what it did best to create a box office hit, but in the short interview I could already see how much different this man's reality was to all of the drama that was contained in the film. I tell you this to give you an example from which I know that there are lessons contained in a real story, but the optical illusion created by the movie might not truly depict the same lessons and their distortion might make them not so useful after all. By the way, I loved the movie even more once I was able to see the real man from which the story was based upon. Hence the lesson, to me reality is much more effective of a teacher than smoke and mirrors. As soon as I am able to see the real person behind the individual that I am sharing with, I learn a great deal more useful lessons.

On a side note, but in order for me to share a final thought about sharing and learning from others, I'll leave you with this final thought. Sometimes listening is harder when the talker is including me in their subject matter. What might seem like criticism and biased opinions is most likely more about them than it is about me. When someone tells me that I make them feel one way or the other, rarely is this an accurate comment. I don't think that anyone truly makes me feel good or bad since I am in control of my own emotions and not them. I decide and it is my choice to make it personal or not. The same is true from the other end too. If someone is a jerk and starts being abusive in their tone and content, I have a choice of believing what they are saying or simply accept the fact that this is truly not about me, but instead about them and their emotional state. It has taken a lot of practice and I am not always able to do what is right, but this is when I am learning to walk away and leave the abuse behind. I am guilty just as everybody else surely must be of sometimes dragging an argument for the sake of trying to be the winner or believing that I am right and the other side is wrong. As hard as it might seem to teach this old dog new tricks, I am definitely learning this lesson and trying to apply it when the right circumstances are in place. I might try to be the sensitive guy for a while and use all those fancy techniques about repeating back to the discontent voice across from me what I hear them say in an effort to allow them to find reassurance in my voice. However, I am quickly learning that it makes even more sense to walk away from heated arguments because what is typically exchanged in those moments is definitely not of true value. Later, when the water is calmer, it makes a lot more sense to throw back in the net and try to catch the information to make things better. I am work in progress, but with so much going on in my life, this is one of the lessons that I am learning that is making a huge difference in all of my relationships, especially with my kids.

Dad