Last fall I attended one of my best friends wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony, held on a rooftop, and was relatively intimate (about 70 attendees is pretty small, right?).
I had driven down with some friends, and only knew a handful of people who were coming. Including the bride and groom, I knew 6 people.
Which meant that I was going to spend a lot of time conversing with a bunch of people I had never met before.
As a general rule, I don't talk a lot. When I'm with my family and people I know, then I'll talk, but with people I've just met, listening is usually what I fall back to. You can learn so much more when you listen.
One of the things I figured out that weekend is that, as much as I am interested in new people, I'm more interested in what they say and why they say it.
I talked to a crazy Danish guy who told me the bride had been his nanny (she wasn't), a cousin of the groom's from Sweden who had a degree in engineering, was working on his degree economics & had previously been a Motocross racer, a photographer who said if I ever wanted to assist on a wedding shoot to just call her, a man who asked me if I was a poet and had a woman tell me that she doesn't sleep well when she eats garlic.
All that, and I only stayed at the reception for a couple hours.
If there is one thing I have never understood about humans, it's conversational topics. I've stood in checkout lines and learned way more about somebody then would ever be necessary.
All the things people tell perfect strangers, but it seems we can never remember to tell the people we hold close that we love them.
2 comments:
Now everyone can facebook or my space. They also, blog. So, having intimate conversations while waiting in line is just an extension of that.
Funny how not many people realize that you can learn a lot more when you listen. Makes you wonder if that's why they're telling you their deepest secrets in the first place... cause it hasn't occurred to them that you're actually listening
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