Selective Hearing

We all hear what we want to hear and remember what we want to remember. How, then, can we ever take into account the world around us? How do you help someone that doesn’t want to be helped? How do you make someone understand you? How do you understand others? Humans are egoistical creatures and seldom do things completely selflessly. However, selfless or not, how do you hurt someone to make them better? How do you push someone away to make them love you more? How do you scream, if nobody is there to hear us? How do we talk, if we don’t want to listen?

It’s hard to put yourself in someone’s shoes. We all try, whether it’s to help a friend, understand a loved one, or to try and estimate our own abilities, but it’s all in vain. In reality, none of us know how we would react when presented with a certain situation. We don’t know what will make us tick or what will make us laugh; what will make us cry and what will bring us closer together. So, we go through life attempting to understand each other, to help each other, sometimes even to listen to each other, but the only thing we hear is ourselves.

We are all self-involved to really hear what others are telling us and we are all self absorbed to really remember your wife’s favorite flower, your best friend’s birthday, your cousin’s favorite book, your boyfriend’s favorite team, your mother’s favorite movie or your boss’s middle name. Yet, we have a talent for acquiring useless information that seems to spit out at all the wrong moments, whether it’s the face cream that a celebrity uses, the stats of a basketball player, the color of your favorite nail polish, another Snapple fact or some other rubbish that you manage to accumulate in your daily life.

I am not sure where I am going with all of this; I guess I’m just rambling, as usual, but how do we make each other listen? How do we take into consideration the world around us? How do we remain friends?