How many conversations can you carry on at once? 1? 5? 72? At what point do they all blend together? How honest do you need to be for all your various conversations to be interchangeable? Or is it just a matter of mental adroitness?
Do you WANT all your conversations to be interchangeable, or is there merit in exploring someone else's point of view, even if briefly? Empathy is sometimes the (perhaps brief) suspension of honesty. And a cruel opinion is not, entirely, the same as honesty. Opinion is often the result of blind faith in your beliefs, without regard for the dissenting view.
Without such an ability to suspend personal truths, how would we enjoy the humour that we do?
1 comment:
When I was younger, I thought I could carry on dozens of conversations at once; I fooled myself into thinking that they were as high-quality as if each were the only one. Now I realize that even carrying on one, fully, is a challenge, precisely because your assumptions ARE your assumptions, i.e. thoroughly ground into your being and therefore well nigh invisible, but not always correct or applicable to the current situation.
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