Listening

"At first, onstage and in life, I didn't really know what relating was. And listening was more a kind of waiting than anything else. I talk and then you talk. And then I listen for when I get to talk again. But relating, I came to understand, happens not just while I"m talking; it also happens while you're talking, and in between.

...When I started out as an actor, I thought, Here's what I have to say; how shall I say it? On M*A*S*H, I began to understand that what I do in the scene is not as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening is what lets it happen. It's almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don't have to figure out how you'll say it. You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the othe rperson brings about a change in you that makes you say it and informs the way you say it.

The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I'm willing to let them change me, something happens between us that's more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out to be how life works, too." - Alan Alda, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed

(the emphasis is mine)

Those are some pretty smart words from a wise man. I wish I had been able to have this state of mind back over the summer when I was going through some personal problems. It would have saved me a lot of grief and trouble, but I guess I had to learn it somehow.