11. Personal interdependency
12. Playing in team
13. The abyss of the solitude
14. To allow the others to convince us
15. The reasons of the others
16. The forms are important
17. Way of explaining and brains
18. Spontaneity, to where?
19. Having conversation
11. Personal interdependency
All we have come to the world as children totally dependent on the others. We have been directed, educated and supported by others during quite a lot time, and it is clear that if that would not had happened thus, we would not have lived more than some few hours, or at the maximum a few days. Later, we were becoming increasingly more independent. It could be able to say that we were taking gradually charge of ourselves.
A person with a physical dependence (a paralytic or a sick of Alzheimer, for example) needs aid of the others. A person that would be very dependent emotionally will make his decisions and he will feel very sure of himself in function of the opinion of the others, of what the others think of him. A person that would be very dependent intellectually, counts on that the others think and decide for him in front of the main problems of his life.
On the other hand, an independent person looks after himself with his own media, he has his own opinion on the things and his own guidelines for the construction of his life.
Nevertheless, that personal independence, that is a decisive achievement in the life, should have also his just measure. Because to be absolutely independent does not seems to be the great paradigm of the existence. This is due, among others things, because the highest achievements of our nature have always to see with our relation with the others. The human life is in itself -by calling it of some way- interdependent.
The sensibility of our epoch has enthroned at times in an exaggerated way the independence, as if it was the largest human goal and a sure guarantee of happiness. Nevertheless, a badly understood eagerness of independence can, in many cases, finish in a lot more bitter dependences.
For example, it is seen in those people that abandon their marriage and their children in name of the love and the independence, although at the bottom they do it for some quite easy to suppose egotistical reasons. Or in that of those that disregard their family or they betray their friends or they renounce to their principles, with regard to an excessive eagerness of personal affirmation in their work, to make more money or to reach greater power. Or the one that is seen in those that speak to break the chains, to be freed, to live the own life…, and in reality they are with it being held by other chains that suppose a lot more strong dependences, because are dependences that are in their interior: in an egotistical search of pleasure or comfort, in a renunciation to manage the own responsibility, or in blaming the others about all the things that turns out to be difficult in their lives.
The personal independence makes us to act by ourselves, instead of delivering to others the control of our life, and that is a very important achievement. But it is not enough as the final goal of a life. It seems clear that always it is convenient to add to the independence a good dose of sensibleness and of good criterion, in order not to fall in the independent stupidity, that not by independent stops being idiot.
The life, naturally, is interdependent. The man cannot seek the happiness putting the independence as central value of its life. Mainly because any achievement in the emotional life of a person passes necessarily by dependence in a way of his woman, of her husband, of his children, of his friends, of his professional project, and so on. On the other hand, all we need to depend also of some principles, ideals and wise personal values.
In short, we can be independent and, at the same time, we can easily understand that the best way to advance consists in working in team, that we need to enrich our thought with that of the other people, that one must be faithful to some sure values or that every man needs to give and to receive affection. The life should be planned seeking to share it deep and significantly with the others, and this always supposes a counterpoint to an eagerness of independence badly understood.
12. Playing in team
If any of us is asked about which have been the most delightful experiences of our life, the ones that we better conserve in the memory and that we recall with greater satisfaction, almost always we will refer to personal experiences inside an assembly of people to whom we appreciate. Perhaps it is the family, or a team of work, or a group of people inside a determined cultural environment, or of a sport, or the like.
Knowing how to share, to do team, and to feel united to other people is always gratifying, and also, usually, a good driving force that make us to try hard to improve. The presence of others inspires us and stimulates us to a level hardly accessible for us going alone. Of the others we learn many things that enrich us enormously, and by helping times we surprise us doing things that perhaps even we would not do neither by ourselves.
The others are a decisive element in our personal improvement. It is certain that the force to change depends to a large extent of us. But also we know that the people that surround us can help us or can hinder us a lot in this project. The capacity to change is seen reinforced when we know to live together with the others, when we know to work in team, when we manage to be near to the people that form our environment.
The one that endeavors inside an environment of confidence and illusion, well integrated among people that he really appreciates, normally tries harder and better. And that uses to produce a beneficial feedback effect. The more you give, the more you receive, and better climate of contribution and support achieve, which always reinforces the satisfaction of all.
It is a matter of knowing how we can get integrated as much as possible in the environments of relation in which we participate. As Anthony Robbins has written, all we play in various teams: the family, our professional environment, our city, our culture, our country, the entire humanity. One is able to remain seated in the stool and to look at, or well to get up and play. And it is much better to play. This implies sharing our world with others. The more we give, the more will be given to us. The more we participate, the more we will give and the more we will receive.
And also one must know how to elect a team correctly. As it is recalled by the popular saying, the most universal law is the law of gravity, which tends to carry us downward, and causes us to abandon many challenges that we should consider. If we know to get surrounded by positive people, with desires to improve, hopefully by managing to yield our talents in service to the others, then we will see us a lot more stimulated. If we manage to play in a team like thus, that is extremely valuable. Therefore it is vital to be surrounded by people that carry us to be a better person each day.
The happiness and the success in the life does not depend on what we have, but more on what we are, of how do we live. And what we do with what we have determines, in great measure, how we live, even in the most minimum details. For example, if we are generous with a person that has done well his work, and we treat him as he deserves, that does us better and does to him. And this is applicable to almost all. We should do a personal reflection on this. And if I would make the purpose to thank always with warmth any favor that I receive or any service that others offer to me, however the small it could be? And if I would dedicate more time to do to whom surround me his life more pleasant? And if I would call occasionally my friends and family, without need of large motives, although only would be in order to interest me for them? And if I would make the purpose to do a contribution, although it could be modest, custom-made to my possibilities, when I am informed about an interesting project? This is a way of life. It is not a question of having a lot of time neither having a lot of money. It is question of how I administer, of what I have, be it little or a lot. To decide with success to what can I dedicate my time and my resources. Of not let me carry by the routine, but to try to put in my life a little more of inventiveness and of reflection.
All this can seem little thing, but it is more important than it seems. Any small detail has a positive effect on us and on the others. And an assembly of small details can change completely the environment of a family, an office, a place of rest, a group of friends, a courtship engagement or a cultural project. To propose that challenge hopefully is something that always is worth while.
13. The abyss of the solitude
"The couple had two children: two intelligent, awake and experienced boys that had at their fingertips the form to treat to their parents to obtain what they proposed.
"Often they resorted to seek unilateral complicities when the parents were in disagreement, and there was such the success with which they utilized their tricks that they always result victorious: "But don't tell it to your father", or well: "Above all, mother must not be informed". It was a comfortable form to solve the problems and to accept without accepting. It was a form to assent betraying. But neither the husband neither the woman realized that this system did not only spoil the children, but they were getting separated little by little of them. They were too busy in organizing their life with tight agendas: meetings, trips, premieres, conferences or invitations of the high society, as to digress on the consequences of the trifles of their children.
"More than being understood, they came to an agreement. And more than interchange opinions, they exchanged a little quantity of time. Thus they were being distanced the one of the other. Little by little they were entering into the destructive arcane of the routine. That type of routines that never leave a step to the surprise and to the adverse suppositions.
"Also the children became separated of them. It is not that they imagined destructive ill wills: simply they had get accustomed to the separation of the ones that were considered united by the simple fact of living together in the same house or by carrying the same surname.
"Suddenly, she began to suffer sudden attacks of meaningless sadness. They were flabby weaknesses impregnated of discouragement and as submerged in ice water. In reality, she did not know with accuracy why she was feeling so discouraged, did not she come to understand the cause. Did neither she miss than her husband, always so busy, had remained impassive and he didn't try to ascertain what occurred to her to be able to help her. She had accepted during much time that her husband never had interfered in her private domains, and he considered that the essential thing was to act as he had always acted: with the naturalness required by the people to whom never something truly different nor tiresome occurred.
"Sometimes they spent hours seated the one in front of the other in the same room without interchanging any word. Each one closed in his things. Or perhaps thinking up as how to get loosened of the other so that the silence that was gripping them was not a shared silence, but something eventual. Thus began that marriage to graze the land of the infidelities. It was a slow transition. As it is the fact to grow. Nobody is found high overnight."
Thus describes Mercedes Salisachs in one of her novels the life of a "respectable marriage", that at the beginning was happy but that was being abandoned little by little. A married life that had become juxtaposition of selfishness and of self-made solitudes.
As Martin Descalzo has written, it is not that all the solitary be egotists and that they have earned all alone the solitude. There is at times a lot of ingratitude that causes many undeserved solitudes. But, the most of the times, the most serious problem is to think that the problem is in the other or in the others. If a person, when is verifying his solitude, would ask to himself: Who wants me? Probably he will succeed in his solitude leaving him. To defeat the solitude one must formulate another question: To whom I want? It is necessary to put affection in the manners with the others, instead of being distressed demanding to be wanted and valued. It is the way to reach remedy to the solitude, because if one puts affection, although it seems to him that he is not corresponded, sooner or later finishes being wanted also.
The insincerity was another of the causes of the solitude in that marriage. At the beginning, that insincerity was smallness, but then were more serious things. And, above all, it declared more important things. When a person has a lack of sincerity, he declares, among others things, a comfortable tendency to the easy and limited to the present time solutions. It is sought to get out of the travel, to avoid any inconvenience, to satisfy a clumsy desire. And the worse thing is that, normally, it carries at the end to a dead end, because the lie has a very short validity, and to maintain the lie immediately one is pushed to lie more, and this conducts to the solitude of who constantly is obliged "to act". Therefore, Jankélévitch said, that one of the hardest punishments of the liar is the loss of his own identity. The liar is locked in a self-made solitude of which he does not know well how to exit. It costs him to open his heart, because he thinks that the building of his life is going to fall down, when the certain thing is that the sincerity is the only way to rebuild it.
14. To allow the others to convince us
Plato, in one of his "Dialogues", raises an interesting discussion between Socrates and Calicles on the force of the reason. Calicles rejects the conventional morality and defends another based on the survival of the fittest. He assures that this law is the one that reigns in the nature and the one that really proceeds of it. Doing evil -maintains Calicles- can be shameful since the point of view of the social conventionalisms, but those conventionalisms proceed of a sociable morale, established by the weak in order to defend themselves against the strong. The weak, that are the majority, join to shape and to enslave to the better and stronger of the men and they proclaim as just the most convenient actions for them.
Through the dialogue, Calicles remains without arguments in front of the objections that Socrates makes to him, but he doesn't stop defending cynically his ideas. He says that the strong men know well that, if it is not necessary, they can commit an injustice with the others, because that is the justice of the strong. In a certain moment he begins to give the reason to Socrates, but immediately contradicts himself and assures that he has not any interest to continue speaking, because he is not willing to be persuaded by the reasons of nobody, and he would resort to the force to impose his arguments. And he continues with affirmations and approaches that today, two thousand five hundred years later, recall us the ones that were collected almost literally by Nietzsche, and put later in practice by the Nazism and other doctrines based on their nihilistic thesis.
I think that the more tragic in the history of Calicles are not his violent and intolerant ideas. The worse thing is his total lack of responsiveness in front of any argument. That is what armors his terrible error and impedes him to leave it.
And that it is, sadly, the attitude with which at times we armor-plate our defects and our incoherencies in some small details of the daily life. Perhaps, when we see that our reasons do not have sufficient weight, instead of analyzing them again, or to seek other reasons that reinforce them or that improve them, or to seek counsel in whom can help us to understand them or to explain them better, we tend to stick to one's guns in front of the reasons of the others.
Be left to be convinced by the reasons of others is, many times -not always, it seems obvious to say it-, a sample of intelligence and of rectitude. Our intelligence is declared not only when we argue, but also when we accept and we understand the arguments of the others. Therefore, the education has so much to do with making us receptive to the reasoning of the others. The reasonable thing is to accept that our reason should be enriched with the reason of the others, with the consideration and acceptance of different points of view, another aims, another objectives, another appraisals.
In order to develop really our intellectual ability it is necessary to develop our listening capacity. We should aspire to be persuaded by arguments, not only to persuade to the others with our arguments. Therefore, if we have very clear our reasons, but we tend to see very little clear the reasons of the others, perhaps it is because a long time ago that we have limited a lot our capacity to learn.
Perhaps good part of the fault of that phenomenon is that it is bad considered to accept that one has been persuaded by the reasons of another. As if to have a change of mind implied to use little the reason. Really, the world is full of people that pride themselves of thinking the same that they thought twenty or thirty years before, and in some cases that can be a demonstration of sensibleness and fidelity to the own principles, but in other many, probably, it shows that they haven't thought too much. They seem invulnerable to any argumentation, and that is not something of what one could be proud of.
15. The reasons of the others
Plato, to think and to explain his ideas better, imagined personages whose ideas were opposite to those of him, so much to state present retorts to his affirmations as for require that he could expose their ideas in several ways and thus improve them. Aristotle maintains to a large extent this system, although of form a little less theatrical, and indicates first the obstacles to his affirmations -He uses to say: "There is here a difficulty…" -, and then overcomes or refutes patiently those objections. Tomás de Aquino, in each article of the Summa, employs his famous formula. He first searches which are the opposite conclusions to the thesis that he maintains, and then, after having exposed the solution according to the order of the reasons, returns to the objections that he had done to himself, and answers them. Also Descartes exchanges arguments to respond to the objections that were launched to him.
In all the cases, a commendable spirit of responsiveness toward the reasons of the others is notified. And that way to lodge in the own house to the adversary, and to give him the occasion to contradict our ideas, has been always a proof of bravery and of coherence of the great men. The thought that has passed through the contradiction is a more mature and contrasted thought. Therefore I am so much worried by the people that seem to be unwilling to consider the reasons of the others.
The men that do not admit the reasons from the others, almost never feel themselves guilty of anything, and that is a devastating situation for anybody. They use to be people that almost always are self-considered as victims. The culpability is something that only applies to the others. Thus is their mind and, whatever happens, at the end final they fall in that original vice. And a moment arrives in which it is no longer a question of bad or good will, but a simple question of ignorance, of a lot of time of not listening to the alien reasons, of too many years to live it all always since the rarefied viewpoint of the selfishness.
It would be able to say that this way to act is influenced a lot of the education that each one has received, and it is true. But also it is certain that our character is done by each one of us. A proof of it is that all we know people that have lived in the same environment, even in the same family, they have been bombarded by the same mass media and influenced by the same routines and customs of the place where they live, and, nevertheless, they are very different people. Many achieve not to fall in the trap to elude always the reasons and points of view of the others, that subtle trap that always is offered to us, tempting. Why? Because they haven't lost their sensibility. They have gone discovering the truth by not thinking always in themselves.
And that effort is rewarded in which they are observant people, which are interested in an extensive range of questions and they have sense of humor, above all to make a little fun of themselves, not at the cost of the others. They do not have need to boast about their successes or about their qualities. In their form to speak they are frank, simple and accessible. At the moment of judging they tend with more facility to overvalue the others that to overvalue themselves. Also they have more consciousness of the measure, and they do not undertake the problems in key of all or nothing, neither have they classified the things between white and black, neither the world between good and bad. They try to discern the bottom of the questions, without letting them being left to carry for hasty impressions or personal conveniences. They receive with moderation the compliments and gratitude, without being conceited, and also the faults by their errors, that don't carry them to be sunk, but to improve their experiences and to rectify.
16. The forms are important
A Sultan dreamed that he had lost all his teeth. After awaking, he ordered to call to a wise person so that he could interpret his dream. "What a misfortune, my Lord!" -the wise said- "each one of your fallen teeth represents the loss of a relative of Your Majesty". "What insolence!"
-shouted the Sultan maddened- "How do you dare to tell me similar thing? Go out of here!" The Sultan called to his guard and ordered that they gave a hundred lashes to him.
Subsequently he ordered that the guard brought to another wise and he counted to him again what he had dreamed. The second wise, after listening with attention to the Sultan, told to him: "My Lord, great happiness has been reserved you, because the dream signifies that you will survive to all your kin". The appearance of the Sultan was illuminated and ordered that a hundred coins of gold were delivered to him.
When this second wise left the palace, one of the courtiers told him admired: "¡It is curious! The interpretation that you have done of the dreams of the Sultan is the same as the one that the first wise did, but the Sultan paid to him with a hundred lashes and to you with a hundred coins of gold". "Remember, my friend -responded the second wise-, that almost all depends on the form in that it is said".
This old history shows how one of the large challenges of the humanity is to learn to communicate. Of the communication depends, many times, the happiness or the misfortune, the friendship or the enmity, the harmony or the conflict. It is certain that the truth should always be said, but the lack of success in the form to express it, or the lack of opportunity in the moment and the circumstances to tell it, causes many times large problems.
It is certain that there are truths that are hard to say or hard to listen, and that even so, one must tell them, but all we should learn how to speak so that our words would not awake the defensiveness of the speaker, that is to say, that who listens to them perceive not them as hostile or like provocation. There are many forms to say the same thing, and normally there is not need to do unpleasant the truth. The truth is like a jewel that can be launched against the face of someone, in order to wound him, or well to be presented and offered in an affable way, with the consideration that he deserves.
The majority of the persons that presume to walk in the life singing the truths to everyone, what perhaps they do not say or they do not know is that they are moved to do it, not by their real love to the truth, but to their eagerness to impress the others, thing that seems that enchants to them. Perhaps they believe that they make a good impression, that they have the last word, when the reality is that they usually act ridiculously and, above all, they do not convince to anyone. To be right with bad manners do not persuade, but it creates madness and irritation. All we need indulgence, and -as Menéndez y Pelayo said- the one who does not offer it to the others, with difficulty will find it then for him.
It would be interesting to examine with which kind of care we treat to each one, if we have the sufficient consideration with all, if we speak to all and of all with respect and appreciation, if we act with justice and loyalty. And perhaps with more reason in his absence: so that, if the interested were present, he remained thanked by the way in which we have spoken of them.
17. Way of explaining and brains
All we have observed how some people possess some qualities that cause them to connect more easily with the others. I do not refer to the large leaders or to those genial personalities that possess a so singular character that the current people can little learn of them. I refer, rather, to those persons that live around us and that have a good capacity to get along with the others, they know how to grasp their feelings and they manage to maintain a good habitual relation with almost everyone.
The capacity that the people have to be understood keeps a deep relation with the emotional education, therefore the people do not express verbally the majority of their ideas or their feelings, but we emit continuous non verbal emotional messages, through signs, expressions of the face or of the hands, the tone of voice, the corporal position or even the silences, so eloquent so many times. Each person is a continuous transmitter of emotional messages of the most diverse kind (of appreciation, displeasure, cordiality, hostility, etc.) and, at the same time, he is also a continuous receiver of the messages that radiate the others.
By that reason, many of the problems of communication among the people use to have their origin in a deficient perception of the emotional messages that are received (we would be able to speak of problems of brains) or in a deficient emission of the emotional messages that they want to express (problems of way of explaining).
It is true that so much the problems of brains as those of the way of explaining can be ours or of the others (in fact at most habitual in practice is that both problems go united), but, normally, we can act a lot more on what is more to our reach, on what are our own defects.
For example, as suggested Antonio Machado, when we do not manage to teach something, it is because perhaps we do not know it still well, and it is probable that we have to learn it to understand it and to express it better.
And if we observe that other people use to see determined matter in a different way from us we see it, it would be of little intelligence to disdain systematically the possibility that the others could be right, or at least that they have a part of the truth. If we tend immediately to consider with completeness that they are wrong, and besides we declare it in such a way that those people perceive that there is displeasure in our attitude, then the most probable is that they raise a barrier in front of us and they consider us as persons in front of whom they should not show any receptivity. As it is natural, it isn't a matter of doubting constantly of our principles or of our personal way of being, since the insecurity in that sense can become a certainly dangerous defect, but it is precise to learn to grasp better the thoughts of the others and to express better our own thoughts.
There is a series of essential attitudes to improve the communication with the people. It is necessary, in the first place, to have an attitude of desire to know the points of view of the others and to be enriched with them. That supposes to be open to be influenced and to change, which is perfectly compatible with having serious and firm convictions. Later, it is precise to state explicitly those attitudes always in behaviors. For example, to listen a lot and with attention; to speak without awaking defensiveness in the other; to try to start from common points of agreement and to advance progressively toward the areas of disagreement; and so on.
Our understanding -I cite again to Antonio Machado- has a gradual scale: first, to understand the things (or to believe that we understand them); second, to understand them well; third, to understand them better; fourth, to understand that there is not better way to understand them than by improving our brains.
18. Spontaneity, ¿to where?
"Mom is that you don't understand. The young people say what they think, without hypocrisies." Thus defended a young adolescent the scarce education and diplomacy of a friend of him to which he had invited to spend a few days with them during the holidays.
Without doubt, the spontaneity is an emerging value in the society of our days. Being spontaneous and natural is something that today -fortunately- is valued a lot. There is a great passion for everything that signifies opening and clarity. The young have respect towards the conducts that reveal authenticity. The young people pay respect to the sincerity of life, perhaps as answer to the refusal produced by some unpleasant aftertaste of the Victorian time that they have detected in the previous generation.
All that, there is no doubt, hides an undeniably positive advance. And in the range of the education, it is a matter of conquest of the contemporary sensibility that has supposed especially valuable contributions. To move in a climate of confidence is considered today as a decisive, fundamental educational principle also for the formation of the own character.
Nevertheless, the reasons that gave that girl show the need of a sensible equilibrium in all that relates to the spontaneity. It seems evident that is precise to find an equilibrium between the hypocrisy and what we would be able to call excess of spontaneity. Because, it seems possible to be courteous without falling in the hypocrisy or in the flattery; to be sincere without resorting to the coarseness and to remain faithful to the own principles without need to offend to the others.
To say the truth that does not turns out to be convenient to reveal, or to whom it is not owed to say, or to say it in an inadequate moment, is -fundamentally- a lack of sensibleness. It seems clear that it is always convenient to add sensibleness to the sincerity, and thus we will save us -as says H. Cavanna- "the sincere stupidity, that not by sincere stops being stupidity".
Throwing out the first thing that comes to one's head without barely thinking it, or to let escape the impulses and the more primary feelings indiscriminately, cannot be considered a virtuous act of sincerity. The sincerity is not a simple verbal unleashing. One must say what he thinks, but one must think what it is said.
The one that founds a friend that has just lost his father and says to him that he does not feel sad at all because his father was unpleasant and unbearable is not sincere, although those were really his feelings, but an authentic savage.
As Juan Bautista Torelló points out, under the excuse of that false sincerity are often hidden: the arrogance, the grossness, an unhealthy tendency to the provocation, exhibitionist tendencies or attraction to wound the others. Who act thus are sad figures, sad men or women without brakes, that are left to carry by their more archaic impulses and that are too distant to reach a minimum of maturity in their character.
The equilibrium between the character and the personality requires a careful compensation between an extreme and another. And as well as thirty years ago could be greater the danger of the stiffness and of the distrust, perhaps now is, rather, that of the excessive lack of inhibition or freedom. It is verified that the exaltation of the spontaneity and the devaluation of the seriousness produce ambivalent fruits. They intend to fortify the personality, and to a large extent they achieve it, but also they bring the risk to produce people with a random spontaneity, thanks to which, they do just what they like, everything that comes to their mind. But the occurrences are always unforeseeable.
19. To have conversation
"There were another causes for that solitude -writes Dorothy Parker- that went back very long ago, to when they were bride and groom. She tried to recall of what they spoke before being married, when they were promised, and seemed to her that they had never much to say each other. But, before, that didn't had worried her, and even she experienced the satisfaction that their engagement went well as she had always heard to say that the true love is not expressed with words. Besides, at that time, the kisses and flirtations had them always get busy. But it happened that the true marriage seemed to be likewise silent, and after seven years of life in common it is not possible to trust in the kisses and in all the like to fill the days and the nights."
Antonio Vázquez has written that the marriage is, among others things, fifty years of conversation. That it is precise to cultivate the desire to know and to be known, to exchange impressions, to communicate. Therefore, who since the engagement center their aspirations in the physical attraction or in the sex, and build on that a relation without any foundation, quickly they find the boredom and the solitude.
I don't want at all with all this to propose a puritan refusal to the body, but simply to put the attention in the need to have conversation, to form our opinion on the things, to have areas of personal interest, to gain in interior depth. Who does not cultivate that interior depth, finishes being a frivolous, superficial person, reduced to the first strata of the life, and that passes through it as if he was in a hasty visit. They are converted little by little in fictitious people, with few illusions of certain importance, guided almost always by the behaviors of their environment; fit themselves meekly in the practices of the fashion.
It is impressive to verify how the spirit of some men and women gets old prematurely by that superficiality and, on the other hand, others remain young and courageous until the end of their days. Therefore we should do the possible thing so that any day the clock of our life doesn't stops and so that, if we see some time that it stops, we know how to put it again in motion as soon as possible. All we have inside many resources that still we have never used, talent that we have not taken advantage of, forces that we have never tested. Therefore, independently of how much busy or tired we were, we can not stop advancing, to learn and to be receptive to the ideas of the others.
To have conversation one must learn to listen. And sometimes we don't do it because we are too busy recalling something that has to do with what the others say to us, and we are preparing a reply. And perhaps there are animated conversations, in which each one takes the words right out of the mouth of the others.
The conversation must be sought. We cannot remain us there, waiting for it to arrive. One must seek it with intelligence. And for it, perhaps the first thing is not wanting to presume of being intelligent, and not to have the arrogance of wanting to show it every moment, but to show us open and receptive, so that we expand each day our range of interests.
We cannot be satisfied with those excessively conventional conversations whose main protagonist is the topic. We cannot be of those people that, when they find you, they cross two or three phrases of commitment, but immediately they have to say good-bye, alleging a small task, because, in reality, they have so a little conversation that almost nothing interests them, they are bored, and they don't know what to say.
The good conversations leave always marks on us and, when the conversation has passed, they come again to the memory: the ideas, the arguments exposed by one and another, and also the arguments exposed by oneself, and new ideas come to us, and the illusion to continue that conversation, that encounter, born.