Listening

At one of my jobs in the past, I discovered I was a sad rattle, to use the eighteenth century term. I was still fitting into the group and trying to working out how work there worked (something I have a philosopher's ability not to understand.) I was anxious, and so I spent a lot of time saying things that put me in (I thought) a better light, that made me feel relevant and valuable.
This was exposed by a friend who was the opposite. He would listen so attentively to my nonsense, allow me to take up so much of his headspace for a couple of minutes, that just to keep speaking made me look at myself from his perspective. I was regularly embarassed by what I was saying, the half-formed windy grumbles; the insights formed by closing one eye and squinting with the other until you could mistake real things for foolish ones.
It is not something I've succeeded in emulating in myself, but it is something lovely. It might be inwardness.

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