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A Message from Me to You
Mar. 13th, 2012 01:13 amDuring my first semester of college I was friend with a band of gentleman whose names and faces I don't remember too much anymore. That's not a particularly great way to begin a story, but in this case it's just a framing detail as this would be a "proto" group of friends, to speak of, that I would have before moving on to the cliche I'm part of now.
Either way, I can't remember the exact details of the discussion but we somehow got led to a topic about I can't even fucking remember. I think it had to do with writing articles for the internet (I can't remember what website we were talking about) that one of these gentleman was talking about contributing to. When asked if I would ever think about contributing to a site, my response was "No. I have nothing of importance to say."
But something I've come to find in the following years is that it doesn't matter if what you have to say is "important" or not as much as the fact that you say it anyway. Importance is a relative term and what may or may not be important to you might be important to someone else. Maybe in the same way, maybe not. But the fact of the matter is that if we want to understand each other, if we want to really communicate with one another, that involves finding out what's important to one another. And those little things that we tend to keep to ourselves, that we convince ourselves are of no importance because they don't deal with politics or religion or something on a grand scheme of things important to the develop of mankind in general does not change, doesn't degrade the fact they might be important in other ways. We all have dusty old books and cheap pieces of plastic that bend and maybe make noises and stupid brightly colored cartoons that flash on TV screens that we remember fondly and that were important to us.
Doesn't it make sense to think that those utterly inconsequential things were important to others too?
I think a big problem with people a lot of times is a lack of communication. In a lot of ways we live in a culture of mockery, primarily fostered by the internet and many of the cultures/subcultures within it and seeping more and more into real life. It can be debatable just how bad this culture is (after all, mockery can sometimes be done in a form of fondness) but I think the fact that we take to mocking so easily is in part a sign of how much we try to avoid actual contact with each other. We downplay and degrade a lot of things for several reasons now, not just out of scorn. But at the same time even though mockery is taking on several different layers/reasons for it now, we still fear it because while people love to be the center of attention that doesn't stop the fact that they hate what can be perceived as negative attention or attention being called to their faults.
But the problem is we tend to see little things, the real important things as faults. And while people may talk about them, they rarely see how important they are or consider them as such. Because sometimes even more than large thinks like political affiliations it might be things like fandoms and interests like that that connect people to one another. The road to communication and understanding is much wider, and has many more ways to walk it, then a lot of people perceive. It's just that we perceive these still legitimate pathways as terrifying back alleys. As seedy little places no one would want to go and that we go down alone if we go down them at all because it'd be assholish to ask anyone else to come with us.
But the thing is people travel down them just the same. And it's always better to travel in a group than alone.
I guess the point of this was more that I think people have come to think about many of the things they care about, be they video games or cartoons or movies, as unimportant. And that isn't true. Because talking about those is as much a path to knowing each other as talking about whether your a Republican or a Democrat or something in between. Don't think you're bothering people talking about small things, take pride.
And who knows. Maybe that small unimportant thing in your life will lead to one of the biggest influences in not just yours, but others, lives as well.
Either way, I can't remember the exact details of the discussion but we somehow got led to a topic about I can't even fucking remember. I think it had to do with writing articles for the internet (I can't remember what website we were talking about) that one of these gentleman was talking about contributing to. When asked if I would ever think about contributing to a site, my response was "No. I have nothing of importance to say."
But something I've come to find in the following years is that it doesn't matter if what you have to say is "important" or not as much as the fact that you say it anyway. Importance is a relative term and what may or may not be important to you might be important to someone else. Maybe in the same way, maybe not. But the fact of the matter is that if we want to understand each other, if we want to really communicate with one another, that involves finding out what's important to one another. And those little things that we tend to keep to ourselves, that we convince ourselves are of no importance because they don't deal with politics or religion or something on a grand scheme of things important to the develop of mankind in general does not change, doesn't degrade the fact they might be important in other ways. We all have dusty old books and cheap pieces of plastic that bend and maybe make noises and stupid brightly colored cartoons that flash on TV screens that we remember fondly and that were important to us.
Doesn't it make sense to think that those utterly inconsequential things were important to others too?
I think a big problem with people a lot of times is a lack of communication. In a lot of ways we live in a culture of mockery, primarily fostered by the internet and many of the cultures/subcultures within it and seeping more and more into real life. It can be debatable just how bad this culture is (after all, mockery can sometimes be done in a form of fondness) but I think the fact that we take to mocking so easily is in part a sign of how much we try to avoid actual contact with each other. We downplay and degrade a lot of things for several reasons now, not just out of scorn. But at the same time even though mockery is taking on several different layers/reasons for it now, we still fear it because while people love to be the center of attention that doesn't stop the fact that they hate what can be perceived as negative attention or attention being called to their faults.
But the problem is we tend to see little things, the real important things as faults. And while people may talk about them, they rarely see how important they are or consider them as such. Because sometimes even more than large thinks like political affiliations it might be things like fandoms and interests like that that connect people to one another. The road to communication and understanding is much wider, and has many more ways to walk it, then a lot of people perceive. It's just that we perceive these still legitimate pathways as terrifying back alleys. As seedy little places no one would want to go and that we go down alone if we go down them at all because it'd be assholish to ask anyone else to come with us.
But the thing is people travel down them just the same. And it's always better to travel in a group than alone.
I guess the point of this was more that I think people have come to think about many of the things they care about, be they video games or cartoons or movies, as unimportant. And that isn't true. Because talking about those is as much a path to knowing each other as talking about whether your a Republican or a Democrat or something in between. Don't think you're bothering people talking about small things, take pride.
And who knows. Maybe that small unimportant thing in your life will lead to one of the biggest influences in not just yours, but others, lives as well.
