Reading is not for everybody. I must have heard that said to me many times in lessons, since there’s always a question about preferences really early on language courses. Plus, how many people in our lives usually claim that?
Listening, as well as reading, requires for us to be in a more passive position. We produce less, and incorporate more, and even when it feels like it’s less work, some of us hate it. I would rather talk than listen, for instance, and that could be a problem.
Aliens, and reading, and listening put us in the background, but we like to talk. As I hinted in the previous 30-min piece, aliens are the topic that’s hot within my environment. I’m very proud of how I’m dealing with it, and this is it: I am not speaking.
I am listening to people I care about talk about what the aliens they care about. What they say usually puzzles me, and produces comments that I want to suffocate. I have come to realize it’s really hard to let a comment go once you’ve formulated it in your mind, at least if you care about exposing your opinions and sensing the result when they reach the intended listener.
My mind wanders a lot thinking how I got there. Do I have to participate with words? Is it ok to just listen? Do I want to just listen? Well, I don’t have answers for that for you, but I do have the answers for myself. They were revealed -and this is what matters- when I stopped for a second and thought: have I ever thought about how the conversation goes when I’m not talking?
I can’t have answers for anyone else. Instead, everyone should be making that assessment, including their own environments and variables in the analysis.
This is a 30-min incomplete take, but it’s somehow something getting somewhere. Read the next one.