Hobo Surfer Hearing Things

I figured it out. There is a way I could live in the woods at six-month stretches at a time, completely as a homeless hermit. So many details to contemplate, but I’ve got them covered. It would specifically have to be our woods, though. The junkyard beyond the railroad tracks is vital to my longterm sustenance in this plan. And, you, allowing your children to leave food scraps on their plates: that’s vital.

I present to you, Miss Problem Solver. We welcome her to a world of people who didn’t ask to have their problems solved. You name a problem, I have a solution. For example, at dinner the other night my friend stated that her foil-wrapped butter cube was too hard. I had to bite my tongue before I instantly listed the three most readily available and possible solutions to said dilemma: A) hold the butter tightly in your warm hand for six seconds, or B) sit on your butter, leaving the wrapper on, for five seconds, or C) hold the butter over the open flame adjacent to your plate. Instead, I inclined my head and apologized graciously while she contemplated rubbing her bread around the plate with a wad of hard butter on the end of a knife.

You see, people want to be heard. Being understood is a basic need. And solving something that wasn’t open for solving, just meant to be considered, is not truly kind. If we want to know the people around us, and actually help the people around us, frequently all that needs to be done, is truly listen.

Listening is not holding your auditory channels vacant for the vibrations of another to fill. That’s hearing; though it is good, it is only step one. Listening is trying on shoes and imaginative immersion. It is where you slip on the idea of being the person who is talking, and feeling through their past experience into their present, realizing the why of their pain, the hilarity of their joke to them, or the reality of the gray rain cloud over their personal space.

When someone walks away from you while you’re still talking to them, it is commonly considered “rude.”  But when your visualizing, connecting brain walks away from someone while they’re still talking to you, it is apparently only “normal-rude.” That is like a person saying to another, “Tolerating your talking should be enough to satisfy the desire to be understood, right? I mean, we are talking.”

True communication is not always talking, though it always equals understanding. If I want to be helpful to someone I care about, perhaps communication through listening with my imagination is my starting line. That doesn’t mean “reading between the lines;” it means mind-surfing. You stabilize yourself upon the wave of their thoughts with a focused energy calculated to keep you balanced and in touch with each undulating onslaught of thought. Hands free, you are steady and gliding over every wave, thinking about what angle it comes from, and where it is going. Sure you can wash up with communication and surfing. We all do. But as you keep getting back up on the “board’ and focusing again, that is where it starts to get fun.

So when I spread my little tarps and make a smoky little fire in the back one hundred, I won’t accidentally solve any more problems for anyone. Or listen to anyone, either, for that matter: only the screaming seagulls in the junkyard, shooting up in puffs of feathers with the firecrackers the other long-haired grubbies blow off… But, I most likely won’t be doing that anytime soon. You get what I’m saying, or are you just hearing me?