i'm starting my life over right now

Be Quiet. Listen.

Written transcript below.

I'm a fan of silence. It doesn't really work in a podcast, I just realized. I had stopped for a moment, I was just looking out the window. The thing about a podcast is that you need to talk, people need to be able to hear what you're saying. What I'm thinking in my brain, if I don't say it out loud, it doesn't connect.

But I do love silence, and I love to sit and just be in people's energy. It can be uncomfortable to be with someone and not use words, especially if you don't know them well. I love to make it a game, so I'll just kind of play these games, especially if I don't know someone very well. For some reason, it works easier for me. I'll just be with someone and say to myself, "I'm going to sit here and see who speaks," and then I'll just let it go. I'll just let the silence happen, right? I'll just be quiet.

It's fascinating to see what happens when you allow yourself to be quiet, when you're not talking, and even more than that, when someone else is talking and you're not talking in your head. You know, that thing you do where someone is telling you a thing, and you realize they're telling you that thing that you had something similar happen to you. So you start to form how you're going to respond and connect with them with, "Oh yeah, I had something like that." And you're starting to create what you're going to say in your head while they're still talking.

Just a heads up, that's interrupting. You can interrupt out loud, or you can interrupt silently, but any time you're not present and involved in a conversation, and someone's talking and you're talking in your head or you're talking out loud, you're interrupting their thought.

It's so nice to practice silence and practice being quiet. And it offers you a new, wide perspective. Because when you listen to what other people say, you hear their point of view. You hear what's happening in their world, in their little universe. Like we're all these separate micro-universes that are part of the whole universe, walking around having our own experience. And it's really difficult to connect if I assume that my experience is the same as everyone else's, because it's not. It's going to be different. We live on the same planet, so we have some of the same things, but how they see the world is unique from how I see the world. And I want to know more about how people see the world because it opens my mind. It expands my mind to be able to see and understand and respect other people's perspectives.

Thoughts with feelings that are strong are your creators. That sense wasn't really great, but the thoughts and feelings that you have are creating your perspective, right? So, understand that's theirs and they get to have that. And I can listen and hear it and not accept it as my own, but also not dismiss it. I don't have to dismiss someone else's perspective because it's not mine. I can understand that's your perspective and it's not mine. I can listen to it without taking it on as my perspective.

It's always okay to be quiet.