Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
This piece was inspired by the unique stories I had the pleasure of listening to this morning at Gunnas. A room full of strangers quickly morphed into a world full of characters, people with rich histories, pains, struggles, triumphs, battles and quirks. This piece is inspired by the people who I met to day. It is for everyone in the world, in our immediate and distant environments, whose stories you might not yet know. Everyone has a story, if you would just give them the space and time to tell it.
Everybody has a story.
But you will never know their story, until you take the time.
By listening, you can learn a lot. The vacancy of our society is evident in this room today; the overwhelming sense of connection that is flowing between everyone highlights the vacancy of connection in our lives, that we most likely accept on any given day, at any given moment when we are not making conscious effort to listen to each other, to be connected.
Take the time.
Allow others to speak their truth and share their story. The ego in all of us is responsible for the verbal purge that comes as we rotate through this competitive world. In a passing moment, we speak but we don’t listen, instead spitting words at each other, trained in one-up-manship, aiming to be better than what has come before.
Rotation.
Rotation through this life, because unless we are consciously aware, we program ourselves into a circular space, a sphere or a bubble of a comfort zone where we feel safe to keep moving around in our circular lifestyle. We break this cycle when we truly connect. When we stop and we listen, we learn. We learn, that at our core, we are all the same. We are born the same. At our core, we hold similar values, beliefs, fears and desires. We are all fearful, but underneath that fear we all want to be loved. Underneath the fear lays the love. In listening to each other today, we learned that everyone holds fear inside of them; an inherent feeling that we are all somewhat incapable of expressing our truth and passions; scared to nourish what make our hearts sing.
Speech and writing as expression are formulae for wonderful healing, growth and connection; something we have arguably lost in a technologically obsessed age. When we listen, we learn that everyone struggles. We learn that everyone triumphs. We learn that we are not alone. We learn this by listening. A precious gift to give a stranger is the time and the space to express what they need to share with the world. Let them express their truth, and a stranger very quickly becomes someone a little more like you.
Unless we take the time to truly listen, to truly let someone speak their deepest story and their life’s truth, we are perhaps at risk of only being told what it is that they think we want to hear, what they think we are interested in. What they think they should say. Constructed stories that are gathered through life, as a means of making others happy, but neglect our greatest truths and desires.
There is a competitiveness, that could be qualified as an insecurity, in all of us; that wants to be good, to be liked, to please. So we forsake our truth for the happiness of others. But when we truly listen, we understand that in each of us lies a story; in each story lies a lesson, lies a pain, a motivator, an intention.
Take the time, and listen.
You never know what you could learn.